What is the best nvidia gpu for gaming?

[brosis]

recommending someone to buy a graphics card and hoping the driver will be stable soon is ridiculous
Save yourself some pain and get an Nvidia card.

No. You miss details. Devil is in details.
Nvidia and AMD cards are totally different league on Linux.

You will have to wait ~6 years till nouveau is usable on 6xx cards.
In several months GCN will be usable. Compare time between Evergreen got advertised and when it become usable with opensource. It required about one year.
AMD opensource driver performance is increasing each year, regardless of card.

So, if you are for opensource drivers - you can forget Nvidia.
If you are ok with closed source, Nvidia is arguably still best.

But then again. If you look at recent changes in Kepler architecture, Nvidia migrate scheduler into the driver. This reduces the chance they will opensource even more.
They are also, becoming more and more "gamer cards". AMD is more "generic" card - compare Luxmark performance for example.

Life is short and there's more important things in the world than open source. Like being able to enjoy your work and your hobbies.

Mr Balmer, please re-login.

[RealNC]

You can always go back to AMD if the drivers ever become good. I waited for years in a state of "in just three months from now the drivers will be awesome". Then I bought an NVidia and drivers were awesome in about 2 minutes (time it took to install them and reboot.) That was a year ago. If I hadn't done that, I'd *still* be waiting for those mythical "good" drivers for Radeon cards.

Life is short and there's more important things in the world than open source. Like being able to enjoy your work and your hobbies.

[peppercats]

Lol.

Either HD58xx, 69xx or 7870+. The opensource driver for 787x+ should stabilize pretty soon.

recommending someone to buy a graphics card and hoping the driver will be stable soon is ridiculous
Save yourself some pain and get an Nvidia card.

[RealNC]

I'm going to be honest, i couldn't control myself and bought the GTX 660 in my way to work...it was stronger than me

If it's made by EVGA, note that you can trade it up for a 700 series when they come out and only pay the difference. Look up their trade-up program.

[DanL]

I'm going to be honest, i couldn't control myself and bought the GTX 660

Good choice. the GTX660 and 650Ti are the best choices in performance/price for us mere mortals who don't want to spend >=$300 on a graphics card.

Note: the GTX650 (non-Ti) is an overpriced poser card. Nvidia's marketing department should be shot for calling it a GTX.

[brosis]

You didn't understand me because you didn't bother to read...if you've read what I've posted in my first reply I said:
I don't see were I've complained about the performance, or crossfire scaling for that matter.

No, I did "bother to read", you didn't bother to understand. Crossfire/SLI require profiles for each game. Someone already tested SLI/Crossfire here on forums and regardless which method used, it brought near x1.0 card performance. That means, crossfire/SLI are non-functional under Linux in proprietary drivers, because both nvidia and AMD do not expect any gamer to use this configuration under Linux. As for opensource driver, nobody yet bothered implementing it, but its not hard thing to do.

So my claim was, that your card crossfire actually run at x1.0 (not x1.5 or x2.0) performance.

I can only recommend you to sell only one of the cards and watch opensource radeon performance from time to time. I think in a year or two MESA/radeon will reach OpenGL 4.0 featureset and will be on par with fglrx in functionality.

I also assume you were refering to fglrx drivers when you said "AMD drivers suck"? Because I use only radeon (not fglrx aka catalyst).

Myself is actually migrating from nvidia into AMD radeon, because I actually found the performance of opensource drivers very adequate to my needs : )
I also wait for Intel Haswell : )

[marco26]

I'm going to be honest, i couldn't control myself and bought the GTX 660 in my way to work...it was stronger than me

[Kano]

Or if you want to wait for next highend 700 series cards (maybe with dx11.1 support, all cards now are dx11.0), those should be out in a few months. The slower/cheaper ones are usually out much later. Series 600 cards have got kepler chips for gt 640 or better (or gt 630 oem, but NOT the retail gt 630) - simpler cards use renamed fermi chips. kepler supports more than 2 outputs the same time. I would not get something below 650 Ti, but it depends how much money you want to spend, get at least kepler. Also FORGET sli/cf - both is completely useless for Linux games.

[marco26]

Wither crossfire is broken or not can be easily measured by PTS, using Unigine or Xonotic profiles; they should have profile for crossfire.
Also, you claimed performance was bad, now you claim performance was not bad.. I don't understand you Every driver has bugs.

You didn't understand me because you didn't bother to read...if you've read what I've posted in my first reply I said:

Right know i have a couple of HD6670 in crossfire and they get the job done easily...but i'm fed up with AMD drivers!

I don't see were I've complained about the performance, or crossfire scaling for that matter.

[pandev92]

You actually compare critical issue (xserver crash) with rendering issue - you are serious? btw, I may remember more examples (broken 3D on 7300/7400 Go since 270 build of the driver - "long" hardware support in nVidia driver is nothing but joke) but this one (GTS 250, GTS 560) just fresh.

Amd had trouble always in my experiencie, I recommended to buy and nvidia gt640 or gt 650