Trying to choose between AMD or Nvidia

[immudium]

Well, he is right. Should have made yourself clearer. Neither nvidia or ATI cards (the current generations at least) offer good "out of the box experience"; in both cases one would have to resort to binaries to get the most out of the card. AMD is closer to providing that "out f the box experience" than nvidia, but this is useless for a practical person that wants to be able to enjoy his new graphics card right now, and not in the near future.
It all comes down (right now) to the proprietary drivers. Which one is easier to handle, provides the best experience, etc. For me, both are simple to install, and both provide more than adequate performance/usability, so the final decision would come to the hardware itself: availability, price, performance against the competition.

Oh, OK, so we are going to keep beating this dead horse. Fine.
A. I said he was right.
B. I was speaking from within the context of the AMD/NVidia binary drivers as to ease of installation. Forgive me for not being pedantic enough.

[etymxris]

Based on all the complaints about ATI, especially with wine, I'd buy an Nvidia card now and then get an ATI for my next card. I'm guessing it's going to be a year or so before the open source ATI drivers are really up to speed. At that point, ATI will be a no brainer. Graphics cards are a quickly changing business. It makes little sense to by a card now based on how you anticipate things will be even a few months from now. By then, new cards will come out, current cards will be much cheaper, and so on.

As for me, I currently have a 7800GT. It's not near the top of the pack, but I'd have to spend $300 or $400 to get %50 improvement. Hopefully by the time my card really starts looking ancient the open source ATI drivers will be on par with Nvidia's performance and stability.

[grigi]

What problems with WINE and ATI? I have constantly searched for these "problems" and is yet to find them. Everything just "works" with the latest fglrx drivers. (The "legacy" ones is a different story though)

Also I find that fglrx on my Mobility X1600 is giving me better-than-windows battery life? So it DOES have decent power-saving options, just not every notebook manufacturer is doing the same thing when it comes to powersaving.

What I have to say is that the current fglrx drivers provide very good performance and compatibility. Most of the porblems was due to the old drivers missing critical functionality, but it does not seem to be the case anymore

Now regarding my NVIDIA based desktop, well neither can give you a good compiz expeirience. ATI's is a bit jerky, and laggy. NVIDIA's is fine initially, but slows down over time, and still has the occasional white window (This was supposed to be fixed, but alas).

[kir?]

Hello everyone.
I am now faced with a situation when I have to make a decision between AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
From this "Nvidia or Ati" thread I gathered that while AMD/ATI has great potential with their partly open specs and such, Nvidia drivers are better right here and now.
At the moment I am more inclined to buy a Radeon and support AMD, but first I need to know several things:

1) How genuine is AMD's desire to be closer to the open-source community? Sure, all the recent AMD news on Phoronix sound great, but is there really initiative, or is it just an attempt to get their reputation with the OSS community back to normal?
I am also interested in how good are the released specs, are they really useful to the open driver developers and so on.

Here it says
Well, I'm cautious, I'd like to find out

2) I would also like to know how do the AMD and Nvidia drivers compare to each other - I don't have any experience with Nvidia + Linux, so this interests me much. I know that Nvidia closed drivers are supposed to be superior - but in what way exactly? Have the AMD drivers gotten any close?

Thanks in advance for any answers - it is quite hard to google this info, since most of the results are dated prior to the AMD/ATI "redemption".

I have never been so happy like when I removed my ati card and replaced it with a nvidia one. Now I have a perfectly working linux system instead of a useless and full of bugs system. And my compiz experience is perfect with an E4500 cpu and a 7300 GT video card.

[Melcar]

What problems with WINE and ATI? I have constantly searched for these "problems" and is yet to find them. Everything just "works" with the latest fglrx drivers. (The "legacy" ones is a different story though)

Also I find that fglrx on my Mobility X1600 is giving me better-than-windows battery life? So it DOES have decent power-saving options, just not every notebook manufacturer is doing the same thing when it comes to powersaving.

What I have to say is that the current fglrx drivers provide very good performance and compatibility. Most of the porblems was due to the old drivers missing critical functionality, but it does not seem to be the case anymore

Now regarding my NVIDIA based desktop, well neither can give you a good compiz expeirience. ATI's is a bit jerky, and laggy. NVIDIA's is fine initially, but slows down over time, and still has the occasional white window (This was supposed to be fixed, but alas).

Back when I used Wine it did have problems with the ATI driver, but at that time I was using fglrx's old code base. I don't use Wine for gaming, so I can't really say, but the driver runs fine in native games.

[val-gaav]

Oh for frak sakes. Fine. Whatever. Excellent point. You are the god-king of semantics. Everything I said was crap. If you want the best bloody "out of box experience" go buy Intel graphics. There, you happy? You win and we didn't have to debate for hours on end about it. Now how about we get back to answering the dudes question about whether to choose ATI or NVidia? Whaddya say?

Well I didn't post this just to be picky. Your statement was false and an unexperienced person might get the impresion that nvidia works out of the box on GNU/Linux ... It doesn't and depending on distro the driver installation may not be as easy.

As for the question if it's only beetwen ATI and Nvidia I would advise ATI. Sure Nvidia drivers are better but fglrx is currently not that far away from them and the promise of nice open source drivers for Ati is very tempting. On the other hand the open source support by Nvidia is just a rumor right now.

I would advise Nvidia only if person is a hardcore gamer, but IMHO if that's how it is dual booting Windows is also a must.

[immudium]

Let's try this again.

Well I didn't post this just to be picky.

Then perhaps you could have been more tactful in your initial reply.

Your statement was false

"Out of the box" is an ambiguous phrase that in your OPINION is false with regards to the context with which I used it.

and an unexperienced person might get the impresion that nvidia works out of the box on GNU/Linux ... It doesn't and depending on distro the driver installation may not be as easy.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. I didn't get the impression there was confusion needing to be corrected. You feel differently. I concede the argument to you that you may possibly have saved someone somewhere some small measure of confusion.

[zinya]

Well I didn't post this just to be picky. Your statement was false and an unexperienced person might get the impresion that nvidia works out of the box on GNU/Linux ... It doesn't and depending on distro the driver installation may not be as easy.

Firstly, when EVERYTHING works 'out of the box' in Linux, that is when Linux will start to fall apart. The whole point of Linux is to be able to do exactly what you want with what you OWN. Grated, closed Nvidia drivers are a bad thing, you can't do what you want with them, but at least it takes some effort to get them working. If you want 'working out of the box' then forget about Linux and crawl back to your winblows install.

As for the question if it's only beetwen ATI and Nvidia I would advise ATI. Sure Nvidia drivers are better but fglrx is currently not that far away from them and the promise of nice open source drivers for Ati is very tempting. On the other hand the open source support by Nvidia is just a rumor right now.

If ATI really release open source drivers (i don't keep much of an eye on ATI) then that'll be great, we'll be able to modify them to exactly what we need. I may even decide to buy my first ATI card.

I would advise Nvidia only if person is a hardcore gamer, but IMHO if that's how it is dual booting Windows is also a must.

HAHAHAHA, HAHAHAHA, HAHAHAHA, ohh please stop. I'm a hard-core gamer, and I SOLELY use Linux. I gave up with Winblows after it ate itself over and over again. Most of the games I play have a native linux install available, or I play them through wine/cedega. They all play fantasticly. Sure, Linux can't handle 'high-end' graphics games, but Linux is being worked on by people who love it, they don't (usally) get paid. If they do, it's not gonna be as much as anyone coding something for Winblows is going to get paid.

This could go on forever, frankly I go by 'If you're going to use Linux, then expect to be treated like you know what you're doing'. If you don't know how to use Linux, and can't be arsed to learn, then you diserve to be using Winblows for your gaming.

[deanjo]

Sure, Linux can't handle 'high-end' graphics games,

Since when? Usually when a game is released natively it's at least on par or exceeds the performance of it's windows counterpart (given that the video drivers are up to snuff).

Perhaps you meant wine?

[dcarpenter85]

Nvidia drivers support redirecting opengl through compiz and the ATI drivers don't. This is enough to make me buy Nvidia over ATI. And yes, I know this is a xorg problem and not necessarily a driver problem, but Nvidia has figured out a way to make it work.