[wellylug] NVidia vs. ATI

Brent Wood pcreso at pcreso.com
Tue Mar 1 21:10:43 NZDT 2005


Hi Jamie...

More about reliability/compatability than straight performace, but here's my
.02c...

I've had MUCH better success with Nvidia, at least on SuSE or Mandrake. Purists
tend to prefer ATi coz they publish more details about their hardware, & let
the OS community build the drivers. (I'm not sure if that really constitutes
better support for Linux, but hey...)

Nvidia have often said that they want to have control over the drivers, so
their products don't suffer from a bad name due to problems which Nvidia is not
resposible for. Not unreasonable, if they do provide an alternative. So they
produce a pretty reliable & effective proprietary driver that you can build &
install yourself.

I had some comments about this from a kernel developer last year. He preferred
ATi from a philosophical perspective, but also commented that by kernel 2.8, he
anticipated critical graphics support being embedded in the kernel, for
performance reasons, and said that for this reason, the ATI approach would be
the long term winner. That may well be the case, but I want reliable Linux 3D
graphics support for current kernels & Nvidia does provide that right now.

I may be able to get you an Nvidia card as an "evaluation" - let me know what
spec if you're interested & I'll get back with some options. If you can
usefully benchmark comparable cards I'm sure a few here would be interested...

Brent

> Which do people find performs better under Linux?
> I'm currently running an ATI9600 and find that its performanace under
> Linux is substantially below how it runs in Windows.
> Are peoples experiences with the Nvidia cards the same, or is it only the
> ATI cards that suffer like this?




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