Most for your money, proprietary NVIDIA or AMD drivers?

[Kano]

Not sure about that. On win of course, but on Linux the driver is not feature complete and slower. Several commercial linux games will not run well (if at all) and wine is bad with intel as well. Only when your games are very simple or flash based, then...

[cutterjohn]

Don't buy ATI for linux use. Don't do that to yourself.

Seconded. MSI GT725 with three years of catalyst hell(mobility radeon 4850/512MB).

Got an eVGA GTX 670 FTW for my new desktop for $400 in June, performance is right up there with the GTX 680, and linux is smooth as silk. Such a pleasure to be able to watch videos in linux without video tearing, games randomly deciding to choke in VERY SPECIFIC instances, etc. (It's not overheating. It started happening as soon as I got the machine with VERY SPECIFIC apps/games under VERY SPECIFIC conditions. Initially I thought that it MIGHT be overheating, or bad memory but running prime95, furmark, unigine, memtest, etc. all turned up zilch. Temps all plateaued at reasonable numbers AND STAYED there when fan was running at max with 100% GPU/CPU utilization. Better than I expected really. I'm pretty sure that in some of the 2009 catalyst threads that I posted about this... then I eventually gave up as the drivers actually got worse or didn't seem to have anything other than support added for a new GPU.)

[nightmarex]

Not that the question had anything to do with Intel but in a few generations... maybe the next tick, their APU will be monstrous right now I can't justify that kinda cost for performance it's insane. Yeah you get a great CPU but the GPU portion isn't on par with the cheap AMD's. I know their support isn't the best and I own both AMD and NVIDIA I think my next rig is going to be AMD as well at least the way things are looking atm.

[adriankx]

For example i was and i am tempted to buy a thinkpad from T series but i was always concerned about optimus but after a bit o googling it seems u can choose in bios to have optimus enabled or not and use with graphic card u prefer. It`s actually great news meaning u can use ur nvidia card to full capacity when playing games or enable intel igp only when u are on the move and need battery life. As for AMD i have a amd laptop with hd3200 IGP integrated and last catalyst show washed colors in videos compared to OSS drivers and on windows it gives me corruptions in games. On windows i reverted to original driver from lenovo website its from 2010 and it works perfect from what i can tell, games have no glitches again and so on. On linux i`m going to be using OSS drivers for ever since i run fedora17. So to sum it up i have a proc from amd l325 athlon neox2 with no cpu scaling integrated graphic card with crappy drivers. So for me no more AMD its time to give others a chance too , meaning intel/nvidia.

P.S. i had high hopes for intel drivers from the performance point of view but i am optimistic they will improve in short time.

[Vadi]

For what it's worth, I'm pretty happy with my GGTX 560. HDMI on Ubuntu worked flawlessly, 1900x1080 resolution is fine, and recent games I've been playing - Oblivion and Two Worlds II work fine on highest graphics possible in settings.

[bug!]

I am the only one which doesn't have any serious problem with AMD GPU? I had radeon 3850, now 5850 and APU E-350. Even video acceleration work on that E-350 with XBMC through HDMI. I played games like Oil Rush, Nexuiz, Quake 4, Enemy Territory, Postal 2. I don't take Wine to comparison as nVidia implements OpenGL in way that doesn't conform to OpenGL specification.
I had also serious issue with nVidia when it fail to redraw page on scrolling and screen corruption.

[Dandel]

I've had issues, and the situation now is much much better than it was a couple of years ago. ( before the Radeon hd series was released)

[Alejandro Nova]

Yeah I would not buy from a company that has not been around for 6 years either...

Next you gonna say don't buy a 3DFX card...

Ironically, the only company who made better than Windows, all-supporting drivers, for all its product line, for Linux, was 3dfx. Even more: there were entire sets of Linux 3dfx drivers, backported to Windows and compiled there, that made up for the absence of official Windows XP drivers.

The only reason you don't see 3dfx support these days is because we're speaking about 12, 13 year old tech at least.

[mtelesha]

Throw your dollars at AMD. They have been awesome in terms of support of OpenGL and they have done a ton on the Open Source Drivers having documentation. NVIDIA has been a pain in the butt and has caused the issues with ATI. People need to stop supporting this jerk of a company!

[JohnBr]

People, soon we will need real good 3D in Linux and I am really inclined to get a 7970 for me in September. I have always had Nvidia, got a 550Ti now working in Linux fine, but I am really willing to get the AMD. So the questions is can I get the AMD? I would like to hear from people that game there. We can not forget the this web site had benchmarks done and they were rather favorable. Left for Dead will run? If there are problems, will I have to kill someone to get it fixed? Please I need feedback, positive ones also because I live in Brazil and this card will cost me 1600 bucks.

Thanks a lot in advance