Trying to choose between AMD or Nvidia

[username]

Hello everyone.
I am now faced with a situation when I have to make a decision between AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
From this (http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7143) "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 (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=831&num=1) it says Some users have been cautious based upon AMD's past shortcomings with concern over how watered-down the specifications may be or that this is just some publicity stunt, but the response as a whole has been very positive. However, their concerns are certainly justified based upon past events (ATI R200 Linux Redux) and we will find out in the coming days and months just how dedicated AMD is to working with the open-source community.
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".

[bridgman]

I'll go dig the snow out of my driveway and stay out of this one ;)

[firewing1]

I've been an nVidia support for a long time, but recently a friend convinced me to buy a Radeon HD 3850 - I haven't regretted it once.

ATI cards may perform slightly lower in terms of benchmarks, but the features are amazing. HDMI out, with sound, is just one example.

One thing remains true for now, nVidia's drivers do seem to work better however I think with the ATI/AMD's open source efforts, that is going to change very soon.

[deanjo]

I know that Nvidia closed drivers are supposed to be superior - but in what way exactly?

Speed, reliability, compatibility, feature rich, working TV out, ease of installation, number of devices supported, SLI support, quicker to resolve bugs. Plus the way they handle bug reports seems more interactive with the end user as well. NVidia has their hounds on the nvnews.net forums and their devels are fairly community active. You submit a bug report there and you actually get the feeling that nvidia uses those bug reports.

[Svartalf]

I'll go dig the snow out of my driveway and stay out of this one ;)

Coward... ;)

[immudium]

It all depends on what's important to you. There are alot of battles to be fought in the Linux and FOSS multiverses. Getting my very expensive video card hardware working is not one I'm willing to fight. Therefore I choose NVidia for the best out of the box experience now. Of course that's just my opinion. However, If supporting the open source community is important to you and you are willing to wait for the open source efforts to mature then ATI might be the right choice. Then again, the progress the Nouveau guys are making should not be ignored. If you don't lean either way in open source vs proprietary, look at the benchmarks and features and make your choice based on price and performance. Again, my opinion is that NVidia exceeds ATI in price and performance at all price levels at least when considered only on Linux platforms. The story changes somewhat on windows, but that's irrelevant.

[Melcar]

Nothing wrong with current ATI hardware, or with the drivers. Provided you get an HD2900 or HD3xxx card, it should all go smoothly. The drivers are fairly simple to install for the most part. They perform decently too. HD3xxx cards are getting cheap now and they are adequately supported with the latest driver. Of course, now the new 9xxx cards from nvidia are showing up, and at a very good price too; I doubt they will be supported with the current binaries, but said support should be coming soon.

[val-gaav]

Therefore I choose NVidia for the best out of the box experience now.
So you use nv driver and call it a good exprience ? With just 2d ?

Really the best out of the box experience right now have intel IGPs ...

Nvidia blob drivers are not out of the box experience in the *nix world ...

[immudium]

So you use nv driver and call it a good exprience ? With just 2d ?

Really the best out of the box experience right now have intel IGPs ...

Nvidia blob drivers are not out of the box experience in the *nix world ...

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?

[Melcar]

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, 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.

[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).

[kirù]

Hello everyone.
I am now faced with a situation when I have to make a decision between AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
From this (http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7143) "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 (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=831&num=1) 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.

[Melcar]

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.


If I'm not mistaken, it's because the nvidia drivers do not go through the xserver. It's a design decision from the developers, but you're right, it doesn't really matter from the end user's point of view, since for them, it either works or doesn't.

[edged]

Hey 'username' are you serious or having fun at others' expense :cool:

So you didn't state what you expect from the card? What are you going to use it for?

@flames, lol ;)

There's no need to get so worked up about this. Not everyone uses their computers for the same purposes, and quite frankly I've had less problems with my current ATI card than I did with my last NVidia! hah :p

[sloggerKhan]

At this point I have a desktop with an nVidia 8600 gt and an ati x700 mobility.

My take at this point is that I'd nVidia on laptops, but at this points I think ATI might have become a better desktop choice. My reasoning for this: The nVidia driver is clearly much better at switching display modes and displays live, which is of huge importance for laptop users. However, so far as video playback goes, I've really found the latest fglrx driver to be amazing. With opengl overlay you can't tell video is being scaled. With the xv overlay it's still good quality and has much lower CPU usage. Especially considering that the nvidia driver hasn't implemented (to my knowledge) acceleration for most hi-def formats (h264?), I really find the ATI driver a good choice for desktop where you don't need to mode change much. By using xv to overlay video, you can run compiz without the flickering. That still leaves games, which might be a reason to not run compiz. But overall, at this point, having used both, I'm at lot more optimistic about future developments for the ATI drivers.

[grigi]

I can't say I agree with the above post. I have an ATI x1600mobility notebook. a colleague has a NVIDIA-based notebook (Quadro 135). both are pretty much identical 15.4" 1680x1050 2GB ram, (Actually the NVIDIA notebook has a Core 2 Duo, whilst my ATI has only a Core Duo), and the NVIDIA notebook has absolutely HORRIBLE power saving abilities.

Lets see: ATI: ~3hours versus NVIDIA: ~1.5 hours.
I have a 5400MAH battery and my colleague battery is 7800MAH, so he should be getting better battery life!

I mean, on a notebook, when performance is comparable, I'd go for better battery life anyday.

[sloggerKhan]

you have a point, and I don't have experience with the battery end of things, however, I'm also not sure a quadro is the right think to compare to a mobility radeon. I mean a quadro is workstation graphics.

[teo_m]

I have a dilemma too. I bought a Dell XPS M1530 with an NVidia 8600M-GT and the only problem I noticed was the fact that the Magic Lamp effect under CompizFusion was unusably slow. Unfortunately, the whole notebook had a lot of problems, like grainy screen, cpu whine, raised keyboard, so I had to return it, got back my money and now I'm in the market again. I found something that I think could be a good deal for these two laptops, the first with an ATI and the second with an NVidia:

HP 8510p GR539AW: C2D T7700, WSXGA+, RAM 2GB, 120GB SATA, ATI HD2600 Mobility 256MB ~1500€
HP 8510w GC113EA: C2D T7500, WSXGA+, RAM 2GB, 120GB SATA, NVidia Quadro FX 570M 256MB ~1480€

As you see, there isn't much difference between the two notebooks, visually they are identical. Considering the small price difference, the slight difference in CPU clock, the fact that the Quadro FX 570M is performance-wise something like the Geforce 8600M-GT, and the current (and future) state of drivers, which one would you pick?
I've been using Compiz constantly on my old Intel GMA950 and I need the snappiest experience possible. The 8600M-GT was less smooth than the 950 but still bearable, how does Compiz generally behave on the cards in the two notebooks?