ATI vs. nVidia
 

While I know neither has a stellar track record in Linux driver support, which one would be the best choice for a Windows gaming PC that also dual boots Linux when play time is over?

ATI users will probably tell you ATI, and NVIDIA user will tell you NVIDIA.

I have both, and I have to say in my personal experience, I have never had trouble installing NVIDIA drivers in Linux.

I have had NVIDIA drivers on LiveCDs that worked as well as installed/compiled drivers on SUSE, MANDRIVA, SLACKWARE, and FEDORA.

I would try to read posts about how people got their particular card to work though. There are probably cards from both manufacturers that aren't supported or just don't have a Linux driver.

I expect Nvidia will win here, by a landslide.

Ati has worse support in general. In fact their current drivers don't even work with their lastest cards.(RX300) Plus their drivers are generally less stable. Proprietary or otherwise. I gone through multiple distros and tried multiple ATI cards and have yet to have a satisfactory experience. Even the open source drivers flaked out on me. Sometimes X would boot and sometimes it would'nt. Games randomly crash, particulary ppracer and quake3. Things may have changed since I lasted bothered, but I don't think I could go back after enjoying months of stability with the nvidia propietary drivers. I can even feel so bold as to turn 3d accelerated X and translucency engine on.

Over the past 3 years I've purchased and used ATI cards as well as nVidia cards. In terms of Linux support, at least in my own personal experience it simply is no contest: nVidia all the way

With ATI, installing their drivers was a lengthy, frustrating, and time-consuming process, and I never did feel that the results were what they should have been. Maybe it was just user error on my part, or maybe I just screwed things up somehow along the way, but the typical installation instructions required that you recompile the kernel, edit various config files, and install (or try to) various additional packages. It just never really seemed to work for me.

With nVidia, installing the drivers is done through running two simple commands, which might require all of about 2 or 3 minutes of time to complete. It's a piece of cake.
Note: The actual <release> value corresponds to the version number of the drivers, and in the second command, that's a zero, not the letter "O"

I have heard that ATI support is apparently "getting better" these days, but after being burned so bad in the past, I seriously doubt I'd be willing to take a chance and risk my money to investigate. Obviously, that's just my own 2 cent opinion, YMMV.

I have to agree with J.W. here about NVIDIA. Easy installation fast and quite stable drivers and as for ATI the installation is some minutes more or never(from my last experience), in my case it's been two weeks now fighting with the terminal, doing fresh installs, recompiling kernel and modules with no luck. I really hope that it's something I'm doing wrong.

Again with nvidia I didn't have a single problem installing them.

My ATI chipset is x1600 (third party board asus with ati chipset)

I recommend NVIDIA because I have ATI and it sucks. I am going to buy an NVIDIA card too. ATI proprietary drivers have many problems, not only on installation. Cedega and Xgl have many problems with them too. NVIDIA seems to be more stable from what I have read in forums.

I have two computers using ATi, one using Nvidia, and one (a laptop) using some onboard video from hell. They all work in Linux, but the Nvidia has easier to upgrade drivers, is more trouble free (does not occasionally exhibit unexpected behavior), and seems to work better for both 2D and 3D applications.

I'm going to throw a spanner in the works and vote ATI,

I have both cards. the latest drivers 8.25 do support the latest cards (1900XTX). The drivers from ATI keep getting better and better. There nowhere near as bad as they used to be.

Your distros package manager should take care of updating them anyway. How hard is it to type "emerge ati-drivers" there is a full howto up on the gentoo-wiki.com if you have any doubts :)

Under windows there performace is stellar in 3d, but more importantly in 2d. The picture quality is so much higher than the nvidia cards. And the same goes for linux 2d performance. A lot of people would not notice that but it makes a differance to me as I can spend 12hours staring at a screen.

Whichever card you go for, it will do a good job in linux and windows. ATI's dark days are long gone.

I have had both cards in the past and Nvidia, on my SuSE box, a long timne ago it was tho, installed OK! I think it was straight from an RPM but the ATI drivers, I never did get working! Its probably easier now but I don't need to find out as my boxes have Intel onboard graphics, which is all I need really for what I do
:-)

nVidia support is quite good. nVidia uses a single driver for every card. This driver will compile a kernel module for itself. You never have to worry about flaky modules because the driver pack compiles a module that it knows will work for that card. It is the coolest thing I have ever seen in linux. If you want to update the driver, you kill kdm, go to a terminal, and do:

./NV* --update

in the directory the driver pack is in.

It will automatically search for a new driver. If there is one, it will install. If you already have the newest driver, it will tell you that and quit. I never, ever had a problem with nVidia drivers, and their cards are fantastic.

I have ATI and Nvidia pc's
and I would also say: Nvidia is the best

Although, ATI is said to have better overall image quality than its Nvidia equivalents (it was on phoronix once)

And ATI is also trying to catch up with Nvidia.
Trying. But they aren't there just yet ;)

Nvidia hands down! They support linux drivers. ATI supports nothing. Do yourself a favor and get a Nvidia Card PERIOD!

I have a radeon 9250 pci card and used the Linux drivers that ati provided on their website and the install was fairly easy if you dig around a bit. The Linux ati community more than makes up for the lack of ati support for it's own Linux drivers.

3 years ago I tried ATI. I vowed I never would again.

Yesterday I decided to try ATI again. This time I think the issue is distro-related (SuSE 10.0, 10.1) so I'm going to try Fedora (which I had recently ditched). If ATI's problems remain, forget it. They ARE easier compared to 3 years ago, but they are by no means anywhere as easy as nvidia to install and expect to work the first time -- even if ATI is known for better output quality. If one can't see the output quality, it's a non-issue. Don't go there. :cool:

I wish you good luck! :) I switched distro from FC5 to Ubuntu with the hope that it solve my long standing problem with 3d acceleration .. did get lucky last night but did an update this morning to the distro and it breaks everything.. now I'm not able to get the 3d acceleration working again .. bad move when I decided to ditch nvidia without a much research on what cards are fully supported in Linux world :(