I would like to ask people to run glxgears and post their results. Run it once with the window minimized and once with the windows not minimized. Post both results and tell us what hardware you are using if possible could some people with high end nVidia cards post their results. This would really help myself and many others see the real difference between nVidia and ATi.

~Sincerely Yevgeniy

Go to anandtech.com and search for 3D benchmarks. They use their own benchmark tool that is much more precise than glxgears. Though the most reliable and fully supported card in Linux is nVidia.

BTW, This thread should be closed.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

This is more of a survey than it is a question, so it's better suited for General -- J.W.

You know, I honestly think that both cards are fast enough. Heck, even my old Radon 9700 Pro is handling all the intense games these days. I would, however, get a nVidia card next because I hear its support in Linux is really good. Any truth to this?

I have no complaints about the NVIDIA-support at all.
But I'm completely oblivious about the ATI-stuff in Linux as far as personal experience goes ; My last ATI card was an ATI EGA-Wonder800.......(And it Rocked!)

ATI support in Linux is pretty terrible, nVidia isn't. I can't remember my ati score from glxgears, but with my nvidia card I got somewhere like 8-9000fps

Yeah i found that many ATi users were getting around that much. Has any one tried playing unreal tournament at max quality @ 1024x768? i get half the frames i get in windows!!!

Games == Wintendo.

Everything else == Linux.

Emulation != Good.

Period.

What in the world are you talking about ut2k4 is not emulated it is a linux native app!

Not true. I do have a win install to run games that will not run in windows, but my first choice is always linux where possible... Games made for linux run very well - ie Doom3 - and I can run them whenever I want regardless of what other apps I tend to be running (ie browsers and office apps).

Running windows games on linux doesn't really use 'emulation' generally, rather parts of the api are replaced with the wine libs. Many windows games run just fine... I run various starwars games and CS:CZ etc...

Linux is a better potential games platform IMO as you can trim it to nothing if you want and mem management is better, etc. It just would be better to have good native games written...

If you must know what I got in glxgears using default window size

Top Left = 4245
Middle = 4312
Minimize (which is useless) = 7707

ABIT TH7II-RAID
Pentium 4 2.0A GHz (Northwood)
512 MB ECC RAMBUS
GeForceFX 5700 Ultra /w 128 MB (memory clocked at 900 MHz)
nVidia driver version 6629
Kernel version 2.6.10 /w agpgart compiled within

I'll say it again glxgears is a utility to show if 3D rendering is working. It is not a good program for benchmarking 3D performance because there are other factors to count for 3D rendering such as processor, memory bandwidth, and AGP speed.

Right now, Anandtech's framegetter is a much better 3D benchmark program for Linux. Articles with framegetter in action is at http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2229 and http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2302&p=1.

Windows games rely on DirectX while Linux uses OpenGL. OpenGL is very intensive than DirectX. Compare both Windows games and Linux games using OpenGL. It will give you very close results.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is a native Linux game. It uses OpenSDL, combination of OpenGL and OpenAL, to make the developers job easier to port it to Linux and many OS that includes support for OpenSDL. Other games also uses OpenSDL. However, OpenSDL is a very slow moving project.

What also makes me mad is that my friend has a Nvidia GeForce 4 MX card or something. I have a Radeon 9700 Pro. MY card easily defeats his card, right? NO! Not in Linux. We both tried playing Counter-Strike:Source through Cedega and his is smooth like a duck. Mine is choppy, even on low detail settings. It's horrible! Even Doom 3 ran better on his Nvidia card. Yes, I am using the most recent ATi drivers with x.org 6.8 and it's no good. DAmn you ATI!!!!!!

Oh yeah, but in Windows everything runs smooth.

Yeah, i ditched my GeForce 4 Ti4200, for my Radeon 9800Pro. Then i realised how shocking ATi is with linux its very frustrating. Driver support is absolutley appauling in linux, but in winslows and Mac, ATi shines! Come on ATi, pull yourself together!

If your serious about linux, get a NVIDIA GeForce. Anyway now days the best-performing card for the money, is the GeForce 6800GT, which is awesome. ATi are great, but in linux its such a joke the drivers and all.