Hi everybody,

I want to know your experiences with these 2 cards. Before my NVIDIA FX5200-128Mb card was having a good driver support, but I heard that ATI has improved its support too. I love to play UT2004 in my linux box but it is time to upgrade the video card to play new games and I'm wondering is there is an improvement on the drivers.

Can you please share your experiances with these cards.

Take a look here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ghlight=Nvidia

It boils down to this: If you want to have a card that sucks, but have open-source drivers for some models, get an ATI. Then start a lot of threads complaining about its performance and overall suckyness with games.

Or get a Nvidia, use the proprietary drivers and enjoy every cent you spend on your card with great performance.

Mega Man X,

Thanks for your comments. Yes I know that NVIDIA has better support and they have more experience with LINUX' drivers than ATI. My NVIDIA card has been running very nice on my box since I configured it time ago.

No problems richikiki. I am sorry if I sound too angry with ATI. But I really don't like the card all together.

Don't think they just suck in Linux though. I still have a mid-range ATI card in a Windows XP PC and it sucks too. If you are familiar with CCC (CATALYST Control Center) is one hell of a buggy application. It is written (poorly written actually) in .NET and it is a nice piece of bloatware. Bugs vary from having a crappy white dot at the left top of the screen (see here) like I do or instability issues (which I had a few drivers back then with my Intel Motherboard. Blue screen once in a while).

Now who the heck programmed that trash may I ask? I wonder if they will bring that garbage to Linux through Mono as well (if they already didn't).

I also dislike AMD processors and I can see they go hand in hand now. The only reason I don't completely hate AMD and ATI is because I would not like for Intel and Nvidia to monopolize the market and the prices reach sky high. But in my humble opinion, Intel and Nvidia are the better products.

Ok, I will stop ranting with my fanboyism now

Regards!

ATI is catching up. It will be way better this year.

It can be. I've no doubt that hardware-wise, ATI is every bit as good as Nvidia. In fact, I found that the GPU's ATI designed for the Nintendo Gamecube and Xbox 360 are awesome.

But when it comes down to software and drivers, they've not impressed me yet. And let's face it: Every piece of hardware is kinda useless without proper drivers.In fact, ATI seems to be getting buggier, especially CCC. So while it has potential to catch up, I would definitely not bet my money on ATI

I have an ATI card on my laptop. You should give them some credit, their drivers improve fast. And although they're not there yet, I still would like to encourage these people... And I like the picture better on ATI anyways.

I think that now is a very difficult time to buy a new GPU for Linux. I've been thinking about getting a new card myself, and I think I'm just going to wait it out a bit. NVidia's binary driver is currently better than what's offered from any front, binary or open source, for ATI. But, the ATI binary drivers are steadily improving, and they're periodically releasing huge amounts of documentation that should eventually result in a very well-written open source driver. But when will that happen? Impossible to say...

Of course, if you're only looking at a 256 Mb card, it's probably not a huge investment. In that case I would go with NVidia right now, unless you're a really big proponent of Free Software.

Hey, just gave another shot with ATI, my old X800 GTO and latest drivers in Ubuntu 7.10. Not that bad. World of Warcraft worked. It crashed 10 times while accepting the terms after patching (hard lock mind you) but worked.

Warcraft III - Frozen Throne works as well. At first, it ran like garbage. It almost felt like I did not hardware acceleration at all. Using the wine war3.exe -opengl flag made the game run at full-speed again. I started a custom game with my loved Orcs against the Night Elves and there were some noticeable graphical glitches. Nothing that hurts the gameplay overall, just small annoyances.

All in all, I was actually surprised to get anything working with ATI. There are still some annoyances though, such as not correctly identifying my monitor, which Nvidia did on the very same machine, so I had to add, manually, the correct refresh rate at my /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Not that big of a deal though.

However, I will quote garr0n here:

That fellow slacker speaks the truth

If you go with an nvidia card you can be almost sure that it will work. Unless it's a laptop card, or some on-board chipset, but even those are mostly supported.
You should be able to get a much, much better card for very reasonable money. A 6600GT should go for 30$ - or something like that on ebay.

Yup.
I have a box full of otherwise great cards that the mfgrs stopped supporting. I can't bring myself to toss them.

As far as ATI vs. NVidia...

ATI has decided to provide open source drivers and let the community work on them too. They are immature right now, granted, but over time they'll overtake NVidia on linux in code quality, since they are in bed with the OpenGL guys and the entire community can help.

NVidia still has the binary with wrapper approach that likes to break whenever you update the kernel. I think this will hurt them on linux in the long run.

If they supplied the source to the distros the maintainers could make sure they update the NVidia driver too. As it is it's a 3rd party proprietary add in so doesn't get updated with the rest of the packages, at least on ded rat.

I'm not really sure what they are protecting, since you can't use the drivers without the hardware. It's ridiculous. I guess they get to control when your hardware goes obsolete that way.

That's probably what it's about. Right now, I'm pretty sure that life at AMD/ATI is chaos. Once they get their "house in order", look out. They're even building mainboards and chipsets for Intel CPUs. AMD, like NVidia, are now building the chipsets and video cards tightly integrated so will end up producing some impressive results.

I'll be looking for a Phenom board in about 9 months. Crossfire should have the kinks worked out by then. I'm betting the drivers on linux will be an order of magnitude better then as well.

I'm currently running AMDX2, but with an NForce chipset and NVidia video, you'd be crazy not to for now. ATI is still sucking. Sure an intel is 7 frames faster average, but I paid several hundred dollars less. I built a gaming rig with 8800GTS 640MB, Athlon X2 for $900 last May. You aren't touching that value with an intel/nvidia for the same money.

As long as the economics are there, and they get their shit wired tight with the Phenom, I'll be going quad core on AMD. For now my AMD X2 is running like a tank... 70FPS in eve-online linux client at a busy gate is no joke. It just works (tm) Not bad at all for WineX...

I'll sure as heck be watching what happens with AMD/ATI. It's shaping up to be interesting.

-Viz