NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Linux Drivers: Catalyst Is Getting Quite Good At 2D

While there's not much variation between the modern, high-performance graphics cards, when using the Qt4-based QGears2 with the X RENDER back-end, the AMD GPUs were edging out past the NVIDIA GPUs. The AMD GPUs with Catalyst on Ubuntu had a small performance advantage across the board over NVIDIA.

While NVIDIA generally wins on the OpenGL front, with the latest Catalyst driver the 2D performance is working surprisingly well.

In the past the Catalyst Linux driver was notorious for its 2D performance, but it seems AMD has finally managed to turn it around.