The whole time I have had linux (nearly a year now) I have had an ATI graphics card and I have been using the ATI closed source drivers (As I like the odd game!). Recently I bought a Nvidia card. The first thing I did was found the Nvidia drivers on their site and installed them no patching or anything. My xorg.conf isn´t half as full of technical jargon as it was before either.

That was it it all worked and xawtv stopped having problems and I stopped getting graphical glitches when I played mafia.

All this bought me to the conclusion that if the Nvidia drivers arn´t good at least the ATI ones suck.

What do you people think?

Hands down, ATi may build better cards but their drivers seem really awful, even under windows. Nvidia cards from my experience run like a dream under linux.

in linux i have not used an Nvidia card yet as both my laptop and desktop run ATI cards.

as for windows... it was (about 2+ years ago) that ATI had cr4p for drivers. but over the past few years ATI and Nvidia drivers have both been very powerful along with their hardware.

the issue boils down for most games with how the game is coded. some are coded to run better on ATI cards, while others are coded to run best on Nvidia cards.

over the past few years i have not seen anything to indicate that ATI has gone back to the 'classic' cr4p drivers they were known for.

now its a matter of prefferance and how much $$$ you want to spend on your vid card.

I don't play games an don't use either NVidia's
or ATI's driver, but use my ATI cards with the
XFree/Xorg drivers and am quite happy :)


Cheers,
Tink

My experience with ATI (Radeon 9700 Pro) has been good. I don't know why people say it's crap in Linux because everything works fine on my computer.

I just go to www.ati.com
download the RPM
RPM -Uvh filename.rpm
run fglrxconfig

and that's it. My games I play all work and the frame rates are fine. Dual monitors are working fine. And, XawTV is working fine, too! By the way, I suggest that everyone goes the dual monitor route! It's so nice having two monitors!

I can't really say anything bad about Nvidia as I have never owned a Nvidia card. If someone were to ask me if I wanted an Nvidia or ATI card, I'd spend my money on either one of them.

Hey SBing how do you know ATI makes better cards??

Lleb_KCir I must admit I tried a while ago playing farcry but the drivers for both windows and linux had bugs that made it unplayable!

Hey Tinkster I could of guessed... work work work (btw I will be back in NZ in November yey!!)

Micro420 I just found that thier drivers were kinda inconsistant one of them I could do rpm2tgz and installpkg and away I went but then others required patching and manual copying of files I think they should go the way nvidia has with an installer. Although there is one thing I miss from the ATI drivers. They automaticallly setup my wheel mouse!

i found the ati drivers for my card (9200se) soo bad i just gave up, and used xfree's divers for this card ... well, to my surprise suddenly my card actually worked, with direct rendering and all (then i switched to xorg )

i thinks its quite sad that ati's drivers are soo crappy they didn't even work for a card they where supposed to work for!!!!.... last time i buy anything with the word "ati" on it! (just another entry to a small list)

i voted for "dono" as i never used nivida cards ....