ATi Proprietary driver finally caught up to NVidia proprietary driver on Linux?

[toupeiro]

It's been a long time since I've run ATi hardware in any of my systems. While I do a lot of work with NVidia hardware, I have always personally believed ATi usually does make better hardware than NVidia if you are comparing similar models. Hardware is only as good as its drivers. Catalyst was very good on Windows, but linux ATi drivers have never been good, but I know they've made some pretty significant progress this year.

So verdict time.. If you are running a somewhat modern ATi card, say newer than an X1800xt, how is your 3d performance and 2d performance compared to NVidia .. say newer than a 7950gt?

[handy]

I have a 24" alu' iMac, with an ATi Radeon HD 2600 PRO graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. I have noticed dramatic improvements in the ATi Linux drivers over the last 8 months or so that I have been using Arch on this system. Though the Linux drivers are still nowhere near as good as the Apple drivers.

On my other machine I run a 7950gt/512/RAM, which I consider to run rings around the ATi system in the iMac.

I will never buy Apple again, they grow old too quickly when you can't upgrade their GPU one way or another.

[mips]

The nvidia drivers are still better than the ati drivers. It's going to take time.