Native support for ATI and nVidia, best choice today?

olav

I have usually chosen nVidia for my GPUs, but on my latest laptop with Optimus, it has been nothing but a hassle to get it to work.

I just want something that is easy and fast to set up and works decent for gaming.

mfillpot

I have had the same negative experiences trying to get ATI to work with the binary drivers on Linux based systems. For that reason all of my systems either have nvidia or intel graphics. ATI has released their specs to the linux engineers and the native kernel drivers are getting better, as for nvidia they jsut started working with the kernel devs and granting information that will improve the performance. Hopefully with the potential of Steam Machines they will both take the Linux ecosystem more seriously and increase their contributions.

olav

Have to say the same. My first computer when I moved to Linux for many years ago, had ATI. It was a mess, and I changed to nVidia. After that ATI was totally out of the picture.

I never had any problems with nVidia or Intel, not much problem with Intel even when they rewrote their driver either that seemed to cause some annoyances.

However, with this last laptop, it is far from as straight forward it was/is with nVidia without Optimus.

I am not sure which way to go now, although I still holds a finger towards nVidia due to their native support compared to ATI and performance compared to Intel.

But, it seems to be a lot going on with AMD/ATI and nVidia considering Steam focusing on Linux. Also, nVidia has met a lot of critics from the community, and lost some big business agreements because of the lack of open drivers in China.

So I feel the best might be to wait, and pay attention to which of the companies would provide the best drivers, both open and closed. A lot has happened since I had problems with ATI, so they might have gotten better with 3D performance in Linux, a couple of days ago they released a bunch of 3D GPU documentation as well. And I have never had any problems with Intel, and with the Iris Pro serie, it seems that they are getting closer to some decent graphical performance.