It's probably a bit soon to say that you'd be able to get your off-the-shelf card to work when you get home; just because they've released the documentation doesn't mean the documentation is sufficient to write drivers with, or that the documentation is necessarily at all accurate. Generally, these things take a certain amount of people trying to write a drivers with a different design that the driver(s) developed internally and reporting inconsistencies and gaps before the documentation is really right. Of course, it's only a matter of time, but that won't help if you were hoping to run out to Circuit City before it's gone and verify that your new graphics card works in a Linux computer in time to exchange it at the store if you got a defective one.