ATI vs. NVIDIA

[daniels]

jdodson: For the r2xx series (up to 9250), there is 3D acceleration through DRI for whatever platform you can put a Radeon in and run Xorg on; this includes powerpc, ia64, hppa, hurd-i386 if you want ... whatever. From a driver point of view, the open source radeon drivers wipe the floor with nv, not only because they have acceleration for some chipsets, but because it's actually readable, and when a bug crops up in them, I can say something other than 'hassle nVidia'.

Daniel, going back to hunt a bug deep down in i810, thanks to the actual open source driver

[poofyhairguy]

emmm, ok well i don't mean to be rude but why would you buy a mac laptop and put gnu/linux on it?

If Hoary is as good as Warty is...I might buy a Mini Mac to put Ubuntu on it. It really is better IMHO.

[Ex-Cyber]

If all you care about is game performance, go with NVidia. If you want a card whose drivers will almost certainly still be actively maintained 5 years or longer from now, go with ATI. I know some people consider the idea of a graphics card that old to be ridiculous, but I haven't upgraded mine for several years and plan to keep it for at least another year, or however long it takes for AMD64 software support to solidify a bit more and budget AMD64+PCI Express platforms to enter the market.

The following is pretty speculation-heavy, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems to fit the facts I've seen much better than any other hypothesis I've encountered.

Many rationales have been offered for NVidia's refusal to support open-source driver development. But I recently found out that it goes beyond that - they don't just shun open source, they seem to shun third-party driver development in general. What makes me say this is that Xi Graphics (not so) subtly complains in several places on their site that they can't get any cooperation from NVidia and that GeForce cards are unsupported by Accelerated-X. My guess is that from a business standpoint (though not necessarily a marketing standpoint), NVidia simply does not consider the end users to really be their customers - they sell chips and license drivers and firmware to card manufacturers. In a couple cases they appear to have leveraged this business model by selling the same chips as two different products and letting the driver/BIOS implement the differences (GeForce vs. Quadro, NForce4 Ultra vs. NForce4 SLI). This is a pretty sweet deal for them, but it also means that the driver is effectively made to be part of the product, and anyone else making drivers would confuse that business model substantially. Ergo, they don't spend any effort helping that happen. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't get me driver support that I feel like I can really trust. But if you're going to buy a new card in 6-12 months anyway, maybe it doesn't matter to you.

[poofyhairguy]

If all you care about is game performance, go with NVidia. If you want a card whose drivers will almost certainly still be actively maintained 5 years or longer from now, go with ATI. I know some people consider the idea of a graphics card that old to be ridiculous, but I haven't upgraded mine for several years and plan to keep it for at least another year, or however long it takes for AMD64 software support to solidify a bit more and budget AMD64+PCI Express platforms to enter the market.

The following is pretty speculation-heavy, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems to fit the facts I've seen much better than any other hypothesis I've encountered.

Many rationales have been offered for NVidia's refusal to support open-source driver development. But I recently found out that it goes beyond that - they don't just shun open source, they seem to shun third-party driver development in general. What makes me say this is that Xi Graphics (not so) subtly complains in several places on their site that they can't get any cooperation from NVidia and that GeForce cards are unsupported by Accelerated-X. My guess is that from a business standpoint (though not necessarily a marketing standpoint), NVidia simply does not consider the end users to really be their customers - they sell chips and license drivers and firmware to card manufacturers. In a couple cases they appear to have leveraged this business model by selling the same chips as two different products and letting the driver/BIOS implement the differences (GeForce vs. Quadro, NForce4 Ultra vs. NForce4 SLI). This is a pretty sweet deal for them, but it also means that the driver is effectively made to be part of the product, and anyone else making drivers would confuse that business model substantially. Ergo, they don't spend any effort helping that happen. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't get me driver support that I feel like I can really trust. But if you're going to buy a new card in 6-12 months anyway, maybe it doesn't matter to you.

So....are you getting that new card to use now....or later when ATI releases the specs...

[Viro]

thats not true at all. nvidia supports more.

nvidia supports gnu/linux amd64, ia64, i386. they also support freebsd i386.

ati? amd64 and i386 gnu/linux only.

neither support gnu/linux ppc.

or SPARC, or Alpha, or anything else really.

emmm, ok well i don't mean to be rude but why would you buy a mac laptop and put gnu/linux on it?

You've obviously never used a Powerbook . It's the coolest laptop ever, and at 12" it's the most portable laptop I've ever owned. Cheapest laptop in the 12" catagory as well. The build quality is fantastic as well. This is the first laptop I've owned where I'm not afraid the screen hinge will die on me. The whole thing pretty much feels solid. But I'm digressing here, and I could go on and on about why run Linux on the Powerbook.

Though I can give 3 reasons not to run Linux. Sleep/3D/Wireless. Everything else is just peachy .

[jdodson]

`
You've obviously never used a Powerbook . It's the coolest laptop ever, and at 12" it's the most portable laptop I've ever owned. Cheapest laptop in the 12" catagory as well. The build quality is fantastic as well. This is the first laptop I've owned where I'm not afraid the screen hinge will die on me. The whole thing pretty much feels solid. But I'm digressing here, and I could go on and on about why run Linux on the Powerbook.
.

your right, i have not run a powerbook before i have a trashy gateway laptop, but it is just that. i never really had good luck with laptops, i usually just stick with homebrew desktop systems. i might try a powerbook though.

[jdodson]

jdodson: For the r2xx series (up to 9250), there is 3D acceleration through DRI for whatever platform you can put a Radeon in and run Xorg on; this includes powerpc, ia64, hppa, hurd-i386 if you want ... whatever. From a driver point of view, the open source radeon drivers wipe the floor with nv, not only because they have acceleration for some chipsets, but because it's actually readable, and when a bug crops up in them, I can say something other than 'hassle nVidia'.

Daniel, going back to hunt a bug deep down in i810, thanks to the actual open source driver

yeah these are very good selling point of ATI cards. i have heard of people playing enemy territory using the open source driver only on an old ATI card getting 30+ FPS(which is cool). if ATI opens the new high end cards in the way they opened the older ones and keeps up the gnu/linux proprietary driver support i might give them another shot. it just seemed to me at the time i made my purchase(no XORG drivers at the time) that nvidia was the better choice.

[poofyhairguy]

yeah these are very good selling point of ATI cards. i have heard of people playing enemy territory using the open source driver only on an old ATI card getting 30+ FPS(which is cool). if ATI opens the new high end cards in the way they opened the older ones and keeps up the gnu/linux proprietary driver support i might give them another shot. it just seemed to me at the time i made my purchase(no XORG drivers at the time) that nvidia was the better choice.

Still is the better choice. ATI drivers sucks (even the new ones) for any card that is not old enough to have open drivers (aka a card new enough to play modern games).

[zenwhen]

Still is the better choice. ATI drivers sucks (even the new ones) for any card that is not old enough to have open drivers (aka a card new enough to play modern games).

Agreed. ATI's drivers are an insult to Linux users and anyone who uses Linux on a regular basis should vote with their money and not support their sick disregard for the open source software commmunity.

Nvidia on the other hand provides drivers that are as good as a binary driver is going to get.

[Viro]

Agreed. ATI's drivers are an insult to Linux users and anyone who uses Linux on a regular basis should vote with their money and not support their sick disregard for the open source software commmunity.

Nvidia on the other hand provides drivers that are as good as a binary driver is going to get.

Ah ... a conundrum . Who to support? Non x86 users will be supporting ATI while x86 users will be rooting for nVidia.