How long do you use proprietary drivers?
 

HI,

I am planning to buy a new desktop PC. It have NVIDIA GeForce GT440 1.5GB OEM Version.

How experiences do you have with NVIDIA card on linux, and how long do you can use original proprietary drivers by NVIDIA?

For Example:

My current laptop have old Mobility radeon X1350. Proprietary drivers worked with kernel from 2.6.21 to 2.6.27, in other words, aka Slackware 12 to 12.2.

kernel 2.6.21 - ati-driver-installer-8.40.4-x86.x86_64.run

kernel 2.6.24 - ati-driver-installer-8.52.3-x86.x86_64.run

kernel 2.6.27 - ati-driver-installer-8.12-x86.x86_64.run

kernel 2.6.29 - Slackware 13 - CLOSING (only open drivers) to Current 13.37

Ati open drivers, actually Gallium and Mesa 3D heats my laptop and I cant nothing to do with this, I want to have a "middle way" graphic card for cutting video and sometimes play some games such as OpenArena, nothing more.

I hope that NVIDIA support is more better than Ati, because I dont want to buy something for 1 or 2 years to usage and after the time go back to NVIDIA open drivers.

How are your experiences?

Currently NVidia gives far longer support for older cards than AMD. I am using them with my GTX260 (the current driver supports almost all cards from the 6-series and newer) and have never had any issues with them.

@Cepoon

I have been using Nvidia drivers since Slackware ver 9 I think .. And never had any troubles :D

When I now buy PC for myself and clients I prefer / suggest only Nvidia cards

LAwrence

I think you are asking the question slightly wrong in the perspective coming from ATI and migrating to Nvidia. The question you should ask is what feature do you need that requires a proprietary driver that you cannot loose.

Another thing that is hard for me to understand when people question something like this coming from ATI, is saying why does ATI only support their cards for 1-2 years. This really confuses me. If something doesn't seem right, it probably is a myth. Sure ATI dropped future driver support for R200 long time ago, when they were still sold. This probably was a poor decision at the time, and they didn't support the open source driver anymore. Then they dropped R300 in future proprietary driver versions, but because of a new strategy, since the R300 open source driver would receive indirect official support. However, if I look at the current state of things, even my 4670 should be unsupported because the technology is more than 2 years old. But it is supported, so this 1-2 years support is definitely not an official thing, and not only that, it is a pure myth.

So the question I mentioned, what do you loose, it's plainly clear. You want an updated kernel, but have to use an old catalyst version. And you are also having trouble with the open source driver over power and temperature control. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the latest versions of the kernel and mesa do support thermal management for R300.

As for your original question, I think any answer is plainly obvious. Nvidia is not ATI. But if subject yourself to proprietary drivers, you are at the mercy of the vendor. Plain and simple. I left Nvidia long ago because I was mistaken they supported open source. I've been on ATI ever since, using the open source driver, and couldn't be happier. Go figure.

One thing I don't want to loose is performance, the second is the features of the card I bought. Regardless of AMD or Nvidia, I will every time miss one of those two if I use the open source drivers, at least at their current state.

The nvidia drivers are currently much better than the ATI ones, especially if you need performance and the fans working properly.

1-2 years might be an exaggeration, but it's not a great one. AMD dropped support for all non-HD cards from the proprietary driver back in March of 2009. r500 series cards were still quite common then, and easy to purchase. Seeing as R600 GPUs were not even out two years, many people were left unable to use fglrx.

Around that time, AMD invested more money and energy in getting the open source driver up to speed. Power management is one area that has always been lacking in the radeon driver, though it has improved significantly recently with the dynpm option.

On the plus side, R600 GPUs have now been out over 4 years, and are still supported by fglrx. Hopefully fglrx will continue to maintain support for GPUs longer than the 1-2 years some folks were left with previously.

Adam

Thanks all for your replies

You said everything what I wanted to tell right now :-)

It is simple. Because I had bad experience. And I think I am not alone. I was reading tons of forums about AMD and their problems in linux. I am not saying this situation cant be change in future. Maybe newer Ati card have better support now.

Eveything what I want is to have working graphic card and doing with her what I wrote. My laptop HP Compaq 6820s have very problematic temperature control. Underlocking graphic card dont help, temperature is high, fans are screaming. Open drivers can be good for some things, but I dont have good experiences with it when you want to play games, cutting videos etc.. If you can do this things with your newer Ati card and open drivers than the situation in ATI is now better.

Why shouldn't people question it? For example, linux driver support for my previous company laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon was dropped after two years (ie. no adaptation to new kernel versions). Of course, Windows support went on much longer. I find that scandalous and I take the liberty to say so.

Nvidia, on the other hand, still support the proprietary linux driver for cards based on Riva TNT and GeForce 1. That's 13 year old chips.

I've been using the proprietary Nvidia drivers for a while here too with no issues whatsoever. I've got a pretty high end card (Overclocked gtx460 1 gig), and I use my Slackware box for playing games, so I need all the performance I can get.

I went with Nvidia over ATI pretty much entirely on their superior Linux drivers.

You will have problems with it - I've got AMD 760G with Radeon 3000HD, and i run slackware 13.37 with ATI Catalyst Drivers from AMD site and i can say something about it.

You want to have good performance? Than Mesa would be much slower, much, much slower. If you enable dekstop effects, from kde for an example, than everything will be slower (everything is ok when you work only with one applications: firefox and nothing more, or mplayer and nothing more), especially when you selected features such as "grayed window when inactive", "slide/glide windows" and you want to have run few apps like: web browser, movie player (doesen't really matter which), music player, something like apps for talking - pidgin and so on. If you selected "blurring window" from desktop effect than even with AMD drivers everything will be much slower to a point where you don't wan't to use it at all, that is why i do not choose "blurring window".

You wan't to have stability? Then...MESA! I can't belive but that's a fact. With AMD drivers if you leave yopur computer for some amount of time and on the taskbar there are apps like web browser, music player and so on, then after some amount of time computer will lose signal from graphic card, your keyboard will have flashing num-lock led, and all will be frozen - only reset or power up button helps. I tried Catalyst from 11.1 to 11.5 and this bug is still present. With MESA you can leave cmoputer with apps on taskbar and computer won't goes into "power saving mode" - i call it like that (even when you turned off all things in power managements, after some time when apps are on the taskbar computer will hang up, os will freeze). There is something more, one more thing - with CATALYST something with playing YT on full screen is wrong. When you switch from full screen to desktop, server X looks like one big square "paint" - something like when you have broken graphic card and memory on it went down. Computer is rock solid with AMD drivers when you do a job, when you work, but when it's in idle time, and there are apps on the taskbar, as i said few times, than it will crash-freeze.


I'm with AMD drivers. Why? Because i want to have kde desktop effect, smooth desktop with apps and movie player in background - but in fact, i can't leave computer with apps because it will crash.

BTW - hibernation doesen't work at all.

I have no problems with the AMD drivers at all.

Because it's often related to the hardware. My friend has Asus laptop with HD3470 and he doesen't have problem that i mentioned above.

BTW - i think that i've found a solution. The DPMS is at fault. It is also in MESA but hashed so it really doesen't work while AMD drivers has DMPS set to "true".

ATI/AMD really made a mistake when they dropped support for all cards before the Radeon HD series. At least they are trying to make beter- AMD has released technical documentation to the open source developers, something that nVidia has never wanted to do. AFAIK there is (or at least was) one person in the AMD GPU department working full time on the open source drivers as well. While nVidia has dropped support for the nv drivers, and is leaving developemtn of nouveau totally up to the community.

You havent tried using that 'support' lately, have you?

The 71.XX dirvers used by the old TNT/TNT2/GF-1/etc will not work with xorg-server versions above 1.4-

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...=122436&page=5

Xorg-server 1.5+ has been used by a lot of distros since, what, about mid 2008? Everything I can think of thats been released in the last 2 years has had xorg-server versions above 1.4.

71.XX dirvers for all intents lost support in 2008. Just nVidia keeps on pushing out 'updates' that work on paper only. Smoke and mirrors.....

BTW, 96.XX cards will probably lose support soon as well. I wouldnt be suprised if 96.XX never gets updated to work with xorg-server 1.10 (stupid naming there from xorg).

I'm starting to get REALLY pissed off with nVidias naming. GT440 OEM is nothing like the GT440 'retail'. (I'd actually much prefer the GT440 OEM, but I cant get one) It wouldnt be so bad if they could be consistent, eg, if all OEM cards were slower than the stock version. But that is not the case though, that would be to simple.....damn you nVidia.

I use the proprietary nVidia drivers as well, and they work great for me on my 9600 GT. I have tried a recent nouveau driver and it works fairly well. However, it still has a ways to go before I'll use it over the nVidia one as I had some lockups with the nouveau driver unfortunately.

My experience with the ATI drivers in the past have been mixed. The open source driver works pretty good as long as you don't do anything too demanding, its a very very stable driver. FGLRX is fast, but had some issues last time I tried it.

Overall, I would recommend nVidia for now. If you want an open source video experience and don't mind losing a few features, I do recommend ATI.