3 ms·

It's still much harder to find ATI drivers for Linux than Nvidia drivers.

JDShu 14y ago
Wait, what? There are radeon drivers within the open source ecosystem, and AMD also supplies an alternate proprietary driver, bad quality as it is, for those people who find 3D support essential. You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.
- cdr 14y ago
  The open source AMD driver has improved a lot over the past couple of years, it's really pretty good. "Pretty good" is unfortunately not good enough for really 3D intensive tasks like newer games, etc. Good enough for the vast majority of desktop tasks though including hardware-accelerated video rendering etc. The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway. My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.
  - dman 14y ago
    What distro are you using? Did you use aticonfig --dual-head to setup your xorg.conf file ?
    - cdr 14y ago
      Mint13 with Cinnamon; not precisely Gnome3 but close enough. And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.
      - dman 14y ago
        You didnt answer my question on whether you used aticonfig? Also which card are you using?
Intermediate 14y ago
There is basically no nvidia drivers available for many modern mobile GPUs on Linux, so I doubt that Nvidia is more linux friendly than ATI/AMD nowadays.
- CrazedGeek 14y ago
  Which GPUs? The only one I can find that they're not supporting yet is the GeForce GTX 680M.
  - Intermediate 14y ago
    Any that comes with Optimus. Nvidia's blob just don't see them.
- cdr 14y ago
  AMD is ruthless about dropping support for older architectures, which hits laptop GPUs especially hard. They're about to drop support for R600 and there's still lower-end devices being sold with those. Fortunately as noted above the AMD open source driver is pretty good, more than good enough for a laptop I would think.

JDShu 14y ago

Wait, what? There are radeon drivers within the open source ecosystem, and AMD also supplies an alternate proprietary driver, bad quality as it is, for those people who find 3D support essential. You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.

cdr 14y ago
The open source AMD driver has improved a lot over the past couple of years, it's really pretty good. "Pretty good" is unfortunately not good enough for really 3D intensive tasks like newer games, etc. Good enough for the vast majority of desktop tasks though including hardware-accelerated video rendering etc. The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway. My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.
- dman 14y ago
  What distro are you using? Did you use aticonfig --dual-head to setup your xorg.conf file ?
  - cdr 14y ago
    Mint13 with Cinnamon; not precisely Gnome3 but close enough. And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.
    - dman 14y ago
      You didnt answer my question on whether you used aticonfig? Also which card are you using?

Intermediate 14y ago

There is basically no nvidia drivers available for many modern mobile GPUs on Linux, so I doubt that Nvidia is more linux friendly than ATI/AMD nowadays.

CrazedGeek 14y ago
Which GPUs? The only one I can find that they're not supporting yet is the GeForce GTX 680M.
- Intermediate 14y ago
  Any that comes with Optimus. Nvidia's blob just don't see them.
cdr 14y ago
AMD is ruthless about dropping support for older architectures, which hits laptop GPUs especially hard. They're about to drop support for R600 and there's still lower-end devices being sold with those. Fortunately as noted above the AMD open source driver is pretty good, more than good enough for a laptop I would think.