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I'm not sure what applications you're talking about when you say they get crushed by Nvidia. AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashi

by lqdc13 11y ago

I'm not sure what applications you're talking about when you say they get crushed by Nvidia. AMD has faster integer operations so they're much better for hashing operations like bitcoin mining and password cracking. Nvidia is better at floating point ops which are used in computational biology and neural nets. Also they use CUDA which is the only interface supported by many libs. AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. By far. Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos. On Windows for games, AMD cards are competitive for almost every given price point. At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little.

rockdoe 11y ago
>AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. Yes, but Nvidia has working proprietary drivers that put anything AMD to shame on Linux. The difference is so big its outright ludicrous, and it gets worse the higher end the card. I have no idea where the "ridiculously unstable" comes from, must be Ubuntu bugs. Or were you talking about AMD's proprietary driver, fglrx? I agree that's garbage. >At the top The top is the GTX980 Ti, for which AMD has no answer. Also if you say "competitive at price point" this means totally disregarding power consumption, of course, where again AMD is so far behind its ludicrous.
- onli 11y ago
  If one let it count there still is the R9 295X2, which beats the GTX 980 Ti. Edit: Source http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496 http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496, because this got downvoted (??)
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    295x2 is a dual GPU card that requires a nuclear reactor to power. It will beat the 980ti in games that will gain 50% when using 2-way crossfire. Considering the usually disadvantages of using crossfire/SLI it's really not worth it.
    - onli 11y ago
      Yeah I know, the card uses a lot of energy, and the potential crossfire issues are not nice. Still, it is an answer to the 980 Ti (or rather, the 980 Ti was an answer to the 295X2).
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        980ti wasn't an answer to 295x2, more like the nail in the coffin, it came out couple of weeks before the Fury at a lower price and at about 1000 times more availability and just pulled the rug under AMD's feet. NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation.
        girvo 11y ago
        > NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation Uhhh... well, look, I don't know much about video cards these days, but that's not quite true: http://www.t3.com/news/nvidia-is-about-to-launch-a-new-monster-dual-gpu-graphics-card http://www.t3.com/news/nvidia-is-about-to-launch-a-new-monst...
        dogma1138 11y ago
        It is quite very true, that dual GPU card if it ever comes out will be a replacement for the TitanZ a niche card not a flag ship. NVIDIA leaned not to repeat that misstake from the 690 which was and be all accounts would be the last time they release a flagship consumer GTX line dual GPU card. When you have a flagship card that can lose in benchmarks to cards 1/4th it's price because SLI/Xfire fails, and when you can't enable all the bells and whistles like Adaptive VSync (GSync/ASync), Temporal AA, DSR, and any other new "tech" that you boast about for 6 months before release because of SLI/Xfire you are going to fail and fail badly. AMD had to release the X2 cards because they could not compete against the GTX780/780ti and the 980 was around the corner, by the time the 295x2 actually was available in the market at any decent amounts the 980 was already out, and while the 295x2 beat it in certain cases it was too little too late, especially considering that the 295x2 couldn't fit in many cases (same issue that the 690 had) needed a 350$ power supply to run which most people don't have (same as the 690), and produced enough hit to start fusion (not that far from the 690). So no NVIDIA isn't fighting in the dual GPU arena anymore, they aren't releasing flagships, and they are smart enough to wait for the very end of their refresh cycle to release a "look how much money I got to spend on the latest Titan" card that will never be produced in any large amounts, will not be needed to beat the competition as far as single card performance goes.
- vliedel 11y ago
  On several laptops already, I got a blank screen at boot, after some updates. Looking for fixes usually gave me "purge nvidia-*". The way i see it these days is that you just have to be lucky.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Solution that works for me is to add the ppa from this page: https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa Everything else requires having to turn off lightdm service or having to ssh to the machine to reinstall the drivers when something goes wrong.
- fulafel 11y ago
  NVidia proprietary drivers are slightly less terrible than AMD's but basically unusable on laptops. Desktop is a far smaller niche. There is nobody that is getting these bugs fixed in distros in a timely fashion, because NVidia doesn't care about laptops and distros don't care about proprietary drivers. See eg this 2+ year old unfixed bug in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/1220426 https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/1220426 (hundreds of comments and subscriptions) AMD open source drivers are on the other hand are pretty stable and work quite well for things like WebGL, light gaming etc.
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    Good point about laptops, I didn't consider the Optimus mess. That said, when we're talking about gaming cards I'm not sure that desktop is a niche compared to laptops.
  - tyfon 11y ago
    I have a laptop with optimus and it works like a charm even in steam using primusrun. For non gaming stuff it is using the intel gpu. All I had to do was install 2-3 packages in arch linux and that was that. I haven't had any crashes in linux due to nvidia in many years either so I'd say that the proprietary drivers they have are stellar. I'm a big open source advocator, however I will use what works and for me nvidia is light years ahead of amd when it comes to linux, sad as it is.
  - Scramblejams 11y ago
    Funny, Nvidia's binary drivers have given me the only consistently good experience I've had on Linux laptops. AMD's binary drivers have been absolutely atrocious and the open source drivers (until recent years?) didn't have enough features and enough power savings to sway me.
    - creshal 11y ago
      Compared to AMD's drivers, Nvidia's are good. Compared to Intel's, both are so horrible it doesn't really matter.
- Zagitta 11y ago
  Can't say I expected to see Nvidia fanboys on HN but the R9 Fury X exists and beats 980ti at >1080p resolutions in games not gimped by Nvidia Gameworks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-... At the same price point using only slightly more power and having nice and quite closed loop water cooling.
  - taspeotis 11y ago
    > the R9 Fury X exists and beats 980ti at >1080p resolutions in games not gimped by Nvidia Gameworks I skim-read for comments regarding the R9 Fury X vs. 980 Ti and in particular comments about >1080p and had to go through seven benchmarks before arriving at an admittedly mixed ray of sunshine for AMD. Quotes from the article: > (Battlefield 4) The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16% > (Crysis 3) Once again the card trails the GTX 980 Ti, but not by quite as much as we saw in Battlefield 4. In this case the gap is 6-7% at 4K, and 12% at 1440p > (Shadow of Mordor) These framerates aren’t bad – the R9 Fury X is always over 30fps – but even accounting for the higher variability of minimum framerates, they’re trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 13-15% with Ultra quality settings > (Civilization: Beyond Earth) ...can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%. > (Dragon Age: Inquisition) The card trails the GTX 980 Ti at all times, by anywhere between 13% and 18%. At this point AMD is straddling the line between the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, and at 1440p they fall closer to the GTX 980. > (The Talos Principle) ...AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X > (Far Cry 4) Overall what we find is that the R9 Fury X has a 9% lead at 4K Ultra, and a 4% lead at 1440p Ultra, making this one of the only games where AMD takes the lead at 1440p. However something interesting happens if we run at 4K with lower quality settings, and that lead evaporates very quickly, shifting to an NVIDIA lead by roughly the same amount. The article concludes: > At 2560x1440 the card loses its status as a viable alternative. AMD’s performance deficit is over 10% at this point... I didn't look up whether those games use Gameworks or not but if six-point-five out of seven games play better on NVIDIA than AMD well ... who is going to look at AMD cards for gaming?
oselhn 11y ago
AMD opensource drivers 3D performance is more than bad. Catalyst driver performance is acceptable for me but I can't use them. It shows artifacts in gnome-shell after some time, resume from RAM almost never works etc. It feels like 10 year old linux user experience.
- onli 11y ago
  Do you use really the newest driver? Witcher 2 for example worked a lot better with it than with Catalyst when I tried it out, I think that was half a year ago.
  - oselhn 11y ago
    My computer is not able to run Witcher 2. It is notebook APU. Some games works on radeon driver but you can't be sure before you try it. Checking minimum spec for game does not help you.
    - onli 11y ago
      Witcher 2 is difficult with the minimum specs anyway, because the official support does not include AMD at all :/ I tested it in the beginning with a HD 7850, and later/currently with a 7950. Am not surprised that it does not work with a notebook APU, it runs with my cards but not with high-fps. With a slower gpu it is bound to fail.
onli 11y ago
> At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little. No, but one step down it does. AMDs R9 390 beats the GTX 970 a little, which also has the problem of only having 3.5GB Vram, instead of 4 as initially announced. The R9 390 has 8. The R9 390X is normally slower than the GTX 980, but also quite a bit cheaper (~100€). (Source: I have a hardware-recommender at www.pc-kombo.de which aggregates many gaming benchmarks to judge processor and graphic cards performance)
- lqdc13 11y ago
  You might be right. I just went to one comparison site: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1100-6429617/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1...
  - onli 11y ago
    The article catches one core point well: the resolution plays into it. When we go to higher resolutions than 1920x1080, the R9 gets a boost. But it has a very strange way of presenting the data. http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-380-r7-370-test/3/#abschnitt_leistung http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-38... shows it easier (1080p Performance).
Synaesthesia 11y ago
The one metric which nVidia is beating AMD handily in is gaming performance/power consumption.
dogma1138 11y ago
Open source drivers are meaningless for gaming, the compiler and driver specific optimizations are not open sourced for AMD neither in the old nor the new driver, and do not seem to ever be. While it's true that AMD has "better" open source drivers I would not go as to say by far, because they are usable and that's about it, you can't use them for gaming no more than you can use the OSS Geforce ones, and on the closed source part NVIDIA driver quality trumps AMD, I wish we were back in the old ATI days with my Hercules Radeon 9800 pro but we aren't. AMD at this point constantly lags behind NVIDIA on everything from performance, to feature support, memory utilization and power consumption. On the GPGPU front NVIDIA is only "better" at FP when you are talking about HP, FullP is just horrid on everything but it's Tesla and 1st Gen Titan cards. And since you don't need to use FP as much because OpenCL and DX-Compute push towards using advanced INT32 operations (mu, mua, sad) it doesn't fair well, NVIDIA dominated when all of the real world applications used FP in their implementations even when you only had to deal with ints (e.g. SHA256) now when you can do INT32 operations it's dragging it's ass behind GCN for most things that people here would care about (Bitcoin, bruteforcing passwords) even if you are buying Tesla's.
- onli 11y ago
  > While it's true that AMD has "better" open source drivers I would not go as to say by far, because they are usable and that's about it, you can't use them for gaming no more than you can use the OSS Geforce ones That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers with 3D performance).
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Being capable of running a game and being viable for gaming are 2 different things, i can run Witcher 2 on a MBP13 with Intel Iris Pro on medium settings at an acceptable frame rate. Neither OSS drivers are going to be viable for a gaming machine e.g. SteamOS Box when It's actually intended to be a gaming machine rather than a machine that occasionally can run games older than X amount of years.
witty_username 11y ago
> Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos. Not just usable, the open source drivers have similar FPS (± 10%) to Catalyst and unlike Catalyst, it doesn't have many bugs and memory leaks.
zanny 11y ago
AMD on Linux is anywhere from 20 - 150% slower than on Windows on either driver depending on workload. Regardless of your title choice, Nvidia will at least have parity with AMD's performance and will usually crush it. It is hard to persuade gamers to adopt a video card with significantly lower performance / $ when they don't care about software ethics. And its inappropriate to say AMD have "better" open source drivers - Nvidia has nothing to do with Nouveau besides three commits to make their mobile APUs boot right on it so people can immediately install their blob driver, and its a disservice to the community and all the developers that have put huge effort reverse engineering one of the worst technical black boxes in history to give Nvidia any credit for their work. If its any companies driver, its Red Hats, but a super majority of contributions to it are from unpaid or freelance developers.

by lqdc13 11y ago

rockdoe 11y ago

>AMD has better open source drivers than Nvidia. Yes, but Nvidia has working proprietary drivers that put anything AMD to shame on Linux. The difference is so big its outright ludicrous, and it gets worse the higher end the card. I have no idea where the "ridiculously unstable" comes from, must be Ubuntu bugs. Or were you talking about AMD's proprietary driver, fglrx? I agree that's garbage. >At the top The top is the GTX980 Ti, for which AMD has no answer. Also if you say "competitive at price point" this means totally disregarding power consumption, of course, where again AMD is so far behind its ludicrous.

onli 11y ago
If one let it count there still is the R9 295X2, which beats the GTX 980 Ti. Edit: Source http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496 http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1437?vs=1496, because this got downvoted (??)
- dogma1138 11y ago
  295x2 is a dual GPU card that requires a nuclear reactor to power. It will beat the 980ti in games that will gain 50% when using 2-way crossfire. Considering the usually disadvantages of using crossfire/SLI it's really not worth it.
  - onli 11y ago
    Yeah I know, the card uses a lot of energy, and the potential crossfire issues are not nice. Still, it is an answer to the 980 Ti (or rather, the 980 Ti was an answer to the 295X2).
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      980ti wasn't an answer to 295x2, more like the nail in the coffin, it came out couple of weeks before the Fury at a lower price and at about 1000 times more availability and just pulled the rug under AMD's feet. NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation.
      - girvo 11y ago
        > NVIDIA was smart enough not to get into the fight with dual GPU cards it's a loose loose situation Uhhh... well, look, I don't know much about video cards these days, but that's not quite true: http://www.t3.com/news/nvidia-is-about-to-launch-a-new-monster-dual-gpu-graphics-card http://www.t3.com/news/nvidia-is-about-to-launch-a-new-monst...
        dogma1138 11y ago
        It is quite very true, that dual GPU card if it ever comes out will be a replacement for the TitanZ a niche card not a flag ship. NVIDIA leaned not to repeat that misstake from the 690 which was and be all accounts would be the last time they release a flagship consumer GTX line dual GPU card. When you have a flagship card that can lose in benchmarks to cards 1/4th it's price because SLI/Xfire fails, and when you can't enable all the bells and whistles like Adaptive VSync (GSync/ASync), Temporal AA, DSR, and any other new "tech" that you boast about for 6 months before release because of SLI/Xfire you are going to fail and fail badly. AMD had to release the X2 cards because they could not compete against the GTX780/780ti and the 980 was around the corner, by the time the 295x2 actually was available in the market at any decent amounts the 980 was already out, and while the 295x2 beat it in certain cases it was too little too late, especially considering that the 295x2 couldn't fit in many cases (same issue that the 690 had) needed a 350$ power supply to run which most people don't have (same as the 690), and produced enough hit to start fusion (not that far from the 690). So no NVIDIA isn't fighting in the dual GPU arena anymore, they aren't releasing flagships, and they are smart enough to wait for the very end of their refresh cycle to release a "look how much money I got to spend on the latest Titan" card that will never be produced in any large amounts, will not be needed to beat the competition as far as single card performance goes.
vliedel 11y ago
On several laptops already, I got a blank screen at boot, after some updates. Looking for fixes usually gave me "purge nvidia-*". The way i see it these days is that you just have to be lucky.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  Solution that works for me is to add the ppa from this page: https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa Everything else requires having to turn off lightdm service or having to ssh to the machine to reinstall the drivers when something goes wrong.
fulafel 11y ago
NVidia proprietary drivers are slightly less terrible than AMD's but basically unusable on laptops. Desktop is a far smaller niche. There is nobody that is getting these bugs fixed in distros in a timely fashion, because NVidia doesn't care about laptops and distros don't care about proprietary drivers. See eg this 2+ year old unfixed bug in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/1220426 https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/1220426 (hundreds of comments and subscriptions) AMD open source drivers are on the other hand are pretty stable and work quite well for things like WebGL, light gaming etc.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Good point about laptops, I didn't consider the Optimus mess. That said, when we're talking about gaming cards I'm not sure that desktop is a niche compared to laptops.
- tyfon 11y ago
  I have a laptop with optimus and it works like a charm even in steam using primusrun. For non gaming stuff it is using the intel gpu. All I had to do was install 2-3 packages in arch linux and that was that. I haven't had any crashes in linux due to nvidia in many years either so I'd say that the proprietary drivers they have are stellar. I'm a big open source advocator, however I will use what works and for me nvidia is light years ahead of amd when it comes to linux, sad as it is.
- Scramblejams 11y ago
  Funny, Nvidia's binary drivers have given me the only consistently good experience I've had on Linux laptops. AMD's binary drivers have been absolutely atrocious and the open source drivers (until recent years?) didn't have enough features and enough power savings to sway me.
  - creshal 11y ago
    Compared to AMD's drivers, Nvidia's are good. Compared to Intel's, both are so horrible it doesn't really matter.
Zagitta 11y ago
Can't say I expected to see Nvidia fanboys on HN but the R9 Fury X exists and beats 980ti at >1080p resolutions in games not gimped by Nvidia Gameworks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/9390/the-amd-radeon-r9-fury-x-... At the same price point using only slightly more power and having nice and quite closed loop water cooling.
- taspeotis 11y ago
  > the R9 Fury X exists and beats 980ti at >1080p resolutions in games not gimped by Nvidia Gameworks I skim-read for comments regarding the R9 Fury X vs. 980 Ti and in particular comments about >1080p and had to go through seven benchmarks before arriving at an admittedly mixed ray of sunshine for AMD. Quotes from the article: > (Battlefield 4) The R9 Fury X does not take the lead at any resolution, and in fact this is one of the worse games for the card. At 4K AMD trails by 8-10%, and at 1440p that’s 16% > (Crysis 3) Once again the card trails the GTX 980 Ti, but not by quite as much as we saw in Battlefield 4. In this case the gap is 6-7% at 4K, and 12% at 1440p > (Shadow of Mordor) These framerates aren’t bad – the R9 Fury X is always over 30fps – but even accounting for the higher variability of minimum framerates, they’re trailing the GTX 980 Ti by 13-15% with Ultra quality settings > (Civilization: Beyond Earth) ...can’t keep this advantage at 1440p, where they go back to trailing the GTX 980 Ti in minimum framerates by 7%. > (Dragon Age: Inquisition) The card trails the GTX 980 Ti at all times, by anywhere between 13% and 18%. At this point AMD is straddling the line between the GTX 980 and GTX 980 Ti, and at 1440p they fall closer to the GTX 980. > (The Talos Principle) ...AMD’s performance once again regresses at 1440p. It’s enough to retain the lead, if just barely, and tie the GTX Titan X > (Far Cry 4) Overall what we find is that the R9 Fury X has a 9% lead at 4K Ultra, and a 4% lead at 1440p Ultra, making this one of the only games where AMD takes the lead at 1440p. However something interesting happens if we run at 4K with lower quality settings, and that lead evaporates very quickly, shifting to an NVIDIA lead by roughly the same amount. The article concludes: > At 2560x1440 the card loses its status as a viable alternative. AMD’s performance deficit is over 10% at this point... I didn't look up whether those games use Gameworks or not but if six-point-five out of seven games play better on NVIDIA than AMD well ... who is going to look at AMD cards for gaming?

oselhn 11y ago

AMD opensource drivers 3D performance is more than bad. Catalyst driver performance is acceptable for me but I can't use them. It shows artifacts in gnome-shell after some time, resume from RAM almost never works etc. It feels like 10 year old linux user experience.

onli 11y ago
Do you use really the newest driver? Witcher 2 for example worked a lot better with it than with Catalyst when I tried it out, I think that was half a year ago.
- oselhn 11y ago
  My computer is not able to run Witcher 2. It is notebook APU. Some games works on radeon driver but you can't be sure before you try it. Checking minimum spec for game does not help you.
  - onli 11y ago
    Witcher 2 is difficult with the minimum specs anyway, because the official support does not include AMD at all :/ I tested it in the beginning with a HD 7850, and later/currently with a 7950. Am not surprised that it does not work with a notebook APU, it runs with my cards but not with high-fps. With a slower gpu it is bound to fail.

onli 11y ago

> At the top, r9-390x beats GTX 980 by a little. No, but one step down it does. AMDs R9 390 beats the GTX 970 a little, which also has the problem of only having 3.5GB Vram, instead of 4 as initially announced. The R9 390 has 8. The R9 390X is normally slower than the GTX 980, but also quite a bit cheaper (~100€). (Source: I have a hardware-recommender at www.pc-kombo.de which aggregates many gaming benchmarks to judge processor and graphic cards performance)

lqdc13 11y ago
You might be right. I just went to one comparison site: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1100-6429617/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amd-radeon-r9-390x-review/1...
- onli 11y ago
  The article catches one core point well: the resolution plays into it. When we go to higher resolutions than 1920x1080, the R9 gets a boost. But it has a very strange way of presenting the data. http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-380-r7-370-test/3/#abschnitt_leistung http://www.computerbase.de/2015-06/amd-radeon-r9-390x-390-38... shows it easier (1080p Performance).

Synaesthesia 11y ago

The one metric which nVidia is beating AMD handily in is gaming performance/power consumption.

dogma1138 11y ago

Open source drivers are meaningless for gaming, the compiler and driver specific optimizations are not open sourced for AMD neither in the old nor the new driver, and do not seem to ever be. While it's true that AMD has "better" open source drivers I would not go as to say by far, because they are usable and that's about it, you can't use them for gaming no more than you can use the OSS Geforce ones, and on the closed source part NVIDIA driver quality trumps AMD, I wish we were back in the old ATI days with my Hercules Radeon 9800 pro but we aren't. AMD at this point constantly lags behind NVIDIA on everything from performance, to feature support, memory utilization and power consumption. On the GPGPU front NVIDIA is only "better" at FP when you are talking about HP, FullP is just horrid on everything but it's Tesla and 1st Gen Titan cards. And since you don't need to use FP as much because OpenCL and DX-Compute push towards using advanced INT32 operations (mu, mua, sad) it doesn't fair well, NVIDIA dominated when all of the real world applications used FP in their implementations even when you only had to deal with ints (e.g. SHA256) now when you can do INT32 operations it's dragging it's ass behind GCN for most things that people here would care about (Bitcoin, bruteforcing passwords) even if you are buying Tesla's.

onli 11y ago
> While it's true that AMD has "better" open source drivers I would not go as to say by far, because they are usable and that's about it, you can't use them for gaming no more than you can use the OSS Geforce ones That is wrong. Since a few versions (since Gallium3D arrived, if I got that right) at least you absolutely can use them to game. I played Witcher 2 on them last week. Also many easier games work fine and stable (Kebal, Mark of the Ninja, Mount & Blade… not hard stuff, but still needing working drivers with 3D performance).
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Being capable of running a game and being viable for gaming are 2 different things, i can run Witcher 2 on a MBP13 with Intel Iris Pro on medium settings at an acceptable frame rate. Neither OSS drivers are going to be viable for a gaming machine e.g. SteamOS Box when It's actually intended to be a gaming machine rather than a machine that occasionally can run games older than X amount of years.

witty_username 11y ago

> Their default open source drivers are actually usable on Ubuntu, while with Nvidia you have to install ridiculously unstable Nvidia proprietary drivers to just watch flash videos. Not just usable, the open source drivers have similar FPS (± 10%) to Catalyst and unlike Catalyst, it doesn't have many bugs and memory leaks.

zanny 11y ago

AMD on Linux is anywhere from 20 - 150% slower than on Windows on either driver depending on workload. Regardless of your title choice, Nvidia will at least have parity with AMD's performance and will usually crush it. It is hard to persuade gamers to adopt a video card with significantly lower performance / $ when they don't care about software ethics. And its inappropriate to say AMD have "better" open source drivers - Nvidia has nothing to do with Nouveau besides three commits to make their mobile APUs boot right on it so people can immediately install their blob driver, and its a disservice to the community and all the developers that have put huge effort reverse engineering one of the worst technical black boxes in history to give Nvidia any credit for their work. If its any companies driver, its Red Hats, but a super majority of contributions to it are from unpaid or freelance developers.