Poll monday: AMD or Nvidia

[shatterblast]

I chose AMD when building my computer since it supports Linux more than nVidia. I'm not saying that nVidia doesn't work well, and I have used it in other computers with Linux builds. It is just that Linus Torvalds himself has bad-mouthed nVidia. I'm very happy with my present setup since I use Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu Linux 14.04.

On a different note, I do believe I read somewhere that nVidia would try to support Linux a bit more in the future.

[OttoRobba]

I chose AMD when building my computer since it supports Linux more than nVidia. I'm not saying that nVidia doesn't work well, and I have used it in other computers with Linux builds. It is just that Linus Torvalds himself has bad-mouthed nVidia.

"Supports more" is a strong statement. They released documentation for the developers of the open source drivers but in general, AMD is awful as far as their own drivers are concerned - and the open source ones still don't offer nearly as decent performance as the blobs.
"Hey guys, we completely dropped support for your gpu so you can't upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 because reasons LOL"--AMD.

nVidia provides great binary drivers - it really is 1:1 in comparison to Windows. It is really stable.
Do they help as much from the developer-to-developer point of view? Nope, not yet at least.

Intel is actually the best one in this regard - there is only one driver, it is their own and it is open source. It functions with Plymouth and all other linux niceties. If anything, I hope they keep improving as drastically as possible on their iris gpus because, honestly, I can run 95% of what I play with a simple intel hd 3000. Wouldn't mind not having to buy a gpu at all in the future.

[jjmafiae]

AMD is working on better Linux support as far as I know, they even released their mantle API for Linux.

[OttoRobba]

AMD is working on better Linux support as far as I know, they even released their mantle API for Linux.

Yep. Doesn't change the fact that the open source driver performance is pretty bad and the proprietary driver support is awful.

"-Oh, you want to use anything non-KDE/Unity? LOL Nope, not with our proprietary drivers!
-But the open source drivers are not powerful enough yet for zee games
-LOL not our problem" --AMD.

This is how I imagine AMD would speak were it a person.

[jjmafiae]

Nah, AMD puts alot of work into their drivers, Nvidia is a bit behind too.

[OttoRobba]

Nah, AMD puts alot of work into their drivers, Nvidia is a bit behind too.

I'm not arguing how much work they do, I'm questioning the quality.

For the past... 3 years, AMD's proprietary drivers have failed to work with Gnome or any libmutter based desktop environment. They also completely dropped support for "legacy" video cards in a way that made it hell to install the drivers in any Ubuntu release that is not 12.04 - and when I finally managed to install it, guess what kept crashing?

If you go with the open source drivers, generally, the fans will always be on full speed except on select cards and, in general, performance will be subpar. It will be so bad that in some cases you are better off using the intel integrated gpu. For instance, the intel hd 4400outperforms the R7 260X with the open source drivers.

I think it is great that they are improving their support and in the future, if it is any better, I might use them. But for right now, with game performance in mind, they are a poor choice.

[jjmafiae]

If someone made a Mantle game for linux it would work very well on AMD cards, but yeah AMD should get the OpenGL support to work better.

[slime]

Mantle is not available for Linux.

[jjmafiae]

14.6 driver which is out for linux and windows supports mantle

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTY0MDM

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthre ... -for-linux

[szensk]

14.6 beta has rendering glitches with my R9 290 on Windows 7 x64. I'll wait for stable.

I have Intel integrated on my laptop, but even Intel generates a lot more heat (and thus poweruse) in Linux than under Windows.