NVDIA or ATI (over Linux)

[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]

Originally Posted by davcefai

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

[asloman]

Originally Posted by leigh123@linux

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

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]

Originally Posted by 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