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View Full Version : ATI/AMD Vs. Nvidia



Mazate
August 26th, 2012, 04:42 AM
Ok, let me preface my question by saying that I know this is going to stir up a hornet's nest but I'm going to be buying a new video card for use with Ubuntu & some light gaming. So, the question is:

AMD or Nvidia?

More often than not it is said that for linux, Nvidia is better. I would love to buy an AMD card because I think you get more bang for your buck. However, if the drivers for AMD are that bad I don't want to spend the money on it. I'm not looking for anything high-end. I'm just looking for something in the neighborhood of $100 to enable me to play source engine games (Wine for now, natively once Steam is introducted to Ubuntu) and maybe some WOW.

Any and all opinions are welcome.

MadmanRB
August 26th, 2012, 04:54 AM
Actually the future will look good for AMD soon, with Weyland not being supported by nvidia.

JDShu
August 26th, 2012, 05:00 AM
Use Nvidia for gaming, AMD for no gaming. In your case, get Nvidia.

Carborundum
August 26th, 2012, 08:49 AM
Actually the future will look good for AMD soon, with Weyland not being supported by nvidia.
You've got that backwards. NVIDIA is looking at supporting Wayland, AMD has no plans to.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2MjY
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2NDQ

Paqman
August 26th, 2012, 09:18 AM
Use Nvidia for gaming, AMD for no gaming. In your case, get Nvidia.

Nvidia also support CUDA (a GPGPU standard) and VDPAU, so they're the best choice for HD video playback and high-performance number crunching.

marin123
August 26th, 2012, 09:47 AM
As an owner of ATI, I recommend Nvidia :)

If you are going to do gaming, you will need Catalyst, and when you set the power mode to Performance, you get a heater. I don't know how is Nvidia, but I know that ATI is bad (comparing Linux & Windows 7).

MadmanRB
August 26th, 2012, 11:14 AM
You've got that backwards. NVIDIA is looking at supporting Wayland, AMD has no plans to.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2MjY
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2NDQ

That was based on last time I checked of course, I did not read those articles yet.
Still Weyland is still a bit a ways off.

mips
August 26th, 2012, 11:27 AM
nVidia

Cheesemill
August 26th, 2012, 11:49 AM
+1 for Nvidia

synaptix
August 26th, 2012, 12:54 PM
Even though I'm not much of a fan of nVidia, +1 nVidia.

sffvba[e0rt
August 27th, 2012, 12:39 AM
I always hear go for nVidia... but I got a good deal on an AMD card and the driver support has been good.

I have played several of the newest games that are supported in Wine without issues.


404

doorknob60
August 27th, 2012, 08:30 AM
You said you want to use Wine? Get Nvidia. With AMD, my experience is the open drivers are not suitable for gaming, at least on the newer cards. Catalyst works pretty well, but Wine has lots of problems. Native games all work fine. Nvidia, everything works, never had any problems.

Stinger
August 27th, 2012, 10:34 AM
AMD or Nvidia?

More often than not it is said that for linux, Nvidia is better. I would love to buy an AMD card because I think you get more bang for your buck. However, if the drivers for AMD are that bad I don't want to spend the money on it.

Any and all opinions are welcome.

The drivers ARE that bad ! Go for Nvidia.
AMD developers have not succeeded in making a driver comparable, that's performance wise, to their windows driver since they started 'developing' in 2005 / 2006.
I have a Radeon 4670 card, not a very old card but already out of support from AMD :-&

I use the open source Gallium driver for that one, it's slower yes but it works much better with video and desktop effects than the AMD driver ever has.
I hope that the open source drivers soon will make the drivers for companies like Nvida and AMD obsolete, open source drivers integrates much better with graphical servers like Xorg and Wayland.

With proprietary drivers You depend on the company to make their driver work for the graphical server and that seems NOT to a priority at AMD and never has been.