ATi vs nVidia Linux Drivers

[jackie]

Hi guys,

I'm going to be upgrading my graphics card, and one of the factors (though a minor one) is estimated performance in Linux for Steam.

Are both parties putting the effort into their drivers for Steam, or does one stand out as significantly better?

For comparison, I will be getting either a 7950 or a GTX 670.

This is not a debate or fanboy discussion question, I am concerned only with the idea what one of the companies is not making an effort with their drivers at the moment.

[Pedro Lobo]

go for Nvidia, Ati probably still thinks that Linux is a CLI OS

[Lucas Buford]

I went back to NVidia and haven't regretted it a second.

[sorath]

Make you choice depending of you financial standing and the most important - the games you will play - some run better with Nvidia, some with AMD (ATI) - see different reviews

[blackout24]

AMD drivers are utter crap. Just look at the amount of glitch and performance issues in the AMD forum compared to NVIDIA. AMD drops cards fast into a legacy branch. Untill 304 NVIDIA supported very old cards and the new >310 branch supports everything 8000 series and higher.

The driver updates by NVIDIA are very frequent and bring significant performance boosts. The update from 304 to 310 has improved performance by 20% across all cards and games.

[bobebubab]

hz, but think all good

[KingBeowulf]

You can surf all the online reviews you want regarding the pros/cons of Nvidia vs. ATI. If you are on Linux, any flavor, however, Nvidia is superior: it just works. AMD/ATI OSS drivers are not ready, and the proprietary drivers (fglrx) are highly unstable, and forget about mobile or legacy support. Nvidia supports older cards failrly well with decent legacy suport. The new 310.x series added quite a few fixes and speed improvments.

Slackware64 14.0 multilib with a Nvidia GT430. Steam for Lnux Beta

[Florigamer91]

Team Fortress 2, Killing Floor and Serious Sam 3 BFE works fine with my Radeon Mobility HD 5650 with Catalyst 12.10 Drivers. The Performance is good.

[KingBeowulf]

@Florian. Lucky you. However, what if you have a slightly older card? Then you will need the older legacy drivers which often will install only with certain kernels/X11 versions. Then you have to hope that the OSS version works.

No thanks, I have been burned to many times by ATI to ever recommend their GPUs for gaming.

[Brizon]

Laptop has NVidia, desktop has ATI. Both work fine, but I prefer ATI because their cards are better at using the gpu for general purpose computations

[Mikolaj]

It depends on what you want, if you want Open drivers, go with AMD, they support their development, contrary to Nvidia who do not want to help in any way. AMD's open drivers are good enough if like me you play strategy games and shun graphics heavy FPS. If you play games that require high performance Nvidia's closed driver is a better choice than AMD's.

[headlesscyborg]

I have invisible line in the middle of screen - top is rendered slower, than the bottom one. And yes, I have AMD. So, buy nVidia. nVidia always had better Linux support.

I should sell my laptop and buy something with nVidia. But I bought it half year ago and I like it. Only one problem - AMD + Linux = terrible combination.

[carterclan]

Never never never get AMD. Even if you get the latest one chances are 12 months from now all support will stop, Ok so if you get an Nvidia card you will have to use the proprietary drivers but at least they are taking steps to improve these drivers for Linux. AMD prefer to pretend we are not there.

[Ferran]

My HD6850 work fine with open source driver,but i can't install flgrx(12.10) beacuse unity disappears and resolution is low after reboot.

[Bons]

@Fish i had this problem also with my Ubuntu install. The guys that are making the Ubuntu 12.10 ISO file had forgotten to slipstream the linux-headers-generic package in the ISO

Try to do a sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic in the terminal and after the install try to install the ATI driver agian and reboot

Hope thuis helps :)

[|[GB]|(>'.')>RatmastarD<('.'<)]

I would love to support AMD, but the graphics drivers NEED to get better! Also they should stop dropping support for older cards so early.