NVDIA or ATI (over Linux)

[WaterPartys]

I was told ATI drivers are way better for Linux users while Nvidia support is near none/zero/empty/nonono :thumbdwn:

Wacha think?

[_Inferno_]

Hard to say since I haven't ever tried an ATI card with Linux.

My experiences have been difficult so far due to missing features in the Linux drivers. I'm hoping that these issues will be resolved soon, but my issue specifically seems to go back 2 - 3 years already, so I am more than a little worried.

That being said, I'm a loyal Nvidia customer, and thankfully the windows drivers are functional at least. The linux drivers install, have a decent gui in nvidia-settings but I need TV Overscan/Underscan correction for dvi-hdmi which I see has been requested for quite a while.

I wouldn't have this prob if I had a normal monitor, but I don't so I do...

Dave

[grey_1]

Not sure who told you that. AMD has recently opened the source code to the community so I'm sure they will improve..but I've lost sleep over trying to get an ATI card installed.

Nvidia on the other hand, while there are bugs, I have had 99% all around great experiences with.

Cards used were 6800GT, 7800GT, 7900GTX, 8800GTS both vanilla and SSC edition. Haven't run my 9800GTX through the mill yet, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Also this Nvidia linux forum is linked off of Nvidia's site with actual nvidia employees here daily answering questions and squashing bugs.

I don't believe AMD even has such a forum...could be wrong though.

[Cambo]

I've had not problems with any Nvidia card I've used. The list includes; TNT2, Geforce 2MX, 5200, 5700LE, and now 7600GS (had AGP before, now got PCIx)

Only ever tried using ATI cards back in the day of the Rage128.

Once I started using Nvidia, I found everything worked as much as I needed.

I'll hold off on the 8 & 9 series cards for a while - it strikes me that too much effort has been spent on designing hardware to handle all the DRM stuff that Vista requires, and getting the drivers working properly.



Cambo

[uOpt]

For the limited 2D opensource drivers provided in the past years ATI is much better. The stupid "nv" thing doesn't have anything useful in it, not even multi-head.

For the binary drivers NVidia is much better, but that might change quickly now that NVidia seems to be overrun by the complexity of new driver requirements and ATI provided documentation for their chips.

[kgroombr]

nVidia was never to blame with the problems I have had. Had a motherboard with a problem BIOS that caused issues. Had a video card fans seize up and cause freezes, reboots, and graphics corruption. I mention this 'cause folks will blame nVidia and their drivers without knowing the root cause of their problems.

I have been very happy with nVidia and their Linux drivers. I would like to see someone using a newer ATI card and how it performs. Don't want to blow the dough myself for an experiment.

Ken

[gradinaruvasile]

I recently changed from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 and now 8.04) and i found the Nvidia drivers work flawlessly (except the 169.12 drivers stripey textures, but installed 173.08 and fixed it) .
Bought a laptop with ATI 7500 Mobility vidcard, installed Ubuntu 804 and guess what - i cant make the ATI proprietary drivers work with it (it seems it is not supported....:thumbdwn: ).
That's my experience...
So... Nvidia is better supported from my point of view.

[carlos]

ATI has virtually no Linux support for the past 10 years. Your post is reversed. nVidia has the best Linux support available for being proprietary drivers.

[blargh]

Thats not exactly an accurate statement.
PRIOR to ATI being acquired by AMD (2006), their drivers were definitely trash. SINCE then, their drivers have been improved to the point where they are approximately equivalent to NVidia. It took a while, but they had a lot of trash to work through. In addition, they've released the specifications for open sourced driver development, and this definitely puts them ahead of nvidia in terms of linux-friendliness.

BTW: posting a poll like that HERE is definitely NOT going to get you any kind of useful results. Most people visiting this forum are biased towards nvidia. Posting a poll like that elsewhere will get you better results, but they will still be influenced by what people remember from the pre-06 condition of ati drivers.

[davcefai]

Can't answer the question because ATI chipsets just DO NOT WORK for me.

So I've got the whole household (6 PCs in all) with NVidia cards.

Now if only they they would sort out the XEN problem.....

[wnd]

A few thoughts.

nVidia's drivers used to be better in terms of stability and performance. I bought a 7800GT to replace my 9800pro and X hasn't frozen ever since. That was, of course, back in 2005 so the situation could be quite different nowadays.

ATI's installer could produce a Debian package back in 2005. nVidia's installer can only install files directly on your disk, past package management system. Debian comes with packaged drivers, but those are often lagging far behind the latest versions. I have a script to package the drivers, but it may stop working when nVidia decides to change something.

All things considered, I prefer nVidia. Having to package the drivers myself is a small price to pay for stability I've enjoyed for past three years. Besides my 9600GT has a passive heatsink.

[Charles Hawkins]

I recently changed from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 and now 8.04) and i found the Nvidia drivers work flawlessly (except the 169.12 drivers stripey textures, but installed 173.08 and fixed it) .
Bought a laptop with ATI 7500 Mobility vidcard, installed Ubuntu 804 and guess what - i cant make the ATI proprietary drivers work with it (it seems it is not supported....:thumbdwn: ).
That's my experience...
So... Nvidia is better supported from my point of view.

Heh, how interesting! My laptop with ATI 7500 Mobility works perfectly but I can't get my Nvidia card to work at all in my desktop nor have I gotten any response from a direct message to Nvidia support nor from the forum. Neither computer has Windows so don't know how/if they work with it.

[ViN86]

from my experience, both drivers work great, but ATI's drivers take more to get installed/setup.

i personally prefer nvidia. their installer package is much nicer.

[timothius]

I find that the NVIDIA drivers are great, until you want to get fast scrolling performance in Firefox. It's almost as if the text rendering is done in software...

With the NVIDIA drivers in windows, or using ATI drivers in Linux I don't get poor scrolling performance.

Even so, I've always had problems installing the ATI drivers in Linux.

[Einmaliger]

I have been using an ATI card for the five years that my current system is running. The quality of the fglrx drivers is very bad and the system often becomes unstable. Using accelerated 3D graphics was possible in a few applications, but the frame rates were at best half as high as in Windows, and leaving the graphics mode constantly caused the kernel to crash, so only hard resets were able to bring back the system. And KDE 4 / composite / beryl / whatever desktop effects? Just forget it! Too bad, since for the most time of the day, desktop effects are the only things I really need my GPU for (since I don't play games frequently).

So, the next PC will not very probably have an ATI card. Actually I registered in these boards to find out if NVidia is the better choice, and from what I've read yet, it is.

[carlos]

Now if only they they would sort out the XEN problem.....

Aww for crying out loud...please fix this!:(

[leigh123linux]

Nvidia support is outstanding and easy to setup , they also add support the latest kernels and Xorg server quickly .
ATI's support of Linux is extremely poor and hard to setup , they took over 5 months to support the latest Xorg server :thumbdwn:

[asloman]

Nvidia support is outstanding and easy to setup , they also add support the latest kernels and Xorg server quickly .
ATI's support of Linux is extremely poor and hard to setup , they took over 5 months to support the latest Xorg server :thumbdwn:

For some time I have been using nvidia on desktop PC and ATI on a Dell Latitude D610 laptop. Until very recently nvidia support has been excellent, though there have been bad interactions with software suspend/tuxonice.

Recently nvidia seem to have done something to screw up badly, as discussed in another thread (possibly more than one), e.g. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123912

ATI have certainly improved the ease of installation of their fglrx driver recently, and also installed a startup script that automatically creates and inserts the required module if you boot up after a kernel upgrade. That worked much better than the old 'radeon' X11 driver for ATI.

However, I was having a lot of trouble getting the laptop to work with projectors for presentations. When I learnt about the 'xrandr' program I found it did not work with the ATI driver. However, it turned out that by then there was an 'ati' driver for X.org. So I installed that, and it has worked perfectly, including using xrandr to make the laptop interact properly with a variety of projectors. I don't know whether ATI contributed to that driver. It also works fine with software suspend2 (tuxonice).

So in the past I would have unhesitatingly voted for nvidia. Now I find ATI winning. But I have not tried an ATI card on my desktop PC.
Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs

[asloman]

Recently nvidia seem to have done something to screw up badly, as discussed in another thread (possibly more than one), e.g. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123912


I seem to have cured the problem on my machine by going back to an earlier version of the kernel.

I now think the bug was not caused by nvidia, since I later found lots of discussion groups reporting the same problem with various graphical devices and various linux distributions. Since reverting to an earlier kernel solve the problem for me I assume it was a kernel bug.

Aaron
http://www.cs/bham/ac/uk/~axs