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The reason I tend to be more interested in AMD graphics cards is that I want basically workable open source drivers in Linux. AMD pays a couple of people to mai

by ploxiln 11y ago

The reason I tend to be more interested in AMD graphics cards is that I want basically workable open source drivers in Linux. AMD pays a couple of people to maintain the upstream linux driver for their cards, NVidia doesn't. So if you have an AMD card that isn't totally new in the last 2 months, you get a working proper resolution desktop with no hassle. (So for this strategy to work with the Fury, you'd probably have to wait another month or two.) I still dual-boot windows just to play recent games, it pretty much always works better than the alternatives, like the closed source Catalyst driver, wine, even native ports. An NVidia card would probably work a bit better for this purpose, and their closed source drivers for linux are also better, but for me the open source drivers are the more significant factor.

Zardoz84 11y ago
But the AMD drivers keeps being a piece of shit on Linux ? I know that improve a lot (from buggy desktop to usable), but lags behind NVIDIA drivers or are at similar level. I'm too tired of fight with issues of these drivers, plus AMD have a bad tendency of drop support for old video cards. I can understand that they drop support for desktop old cards, but not should be too fast with notebooks cards, that can't replace the GPU.
dogma1138 11y ago
NVIDIA releases Linux and BSD drivers every month together with the Windows drivers (Linux drivers are released 1 week earlier usually) They aren't GPL but the shader compilers in the drivers are considered "trade secrets" in this industry, AMD doesn't release those under GPL or any other OSS license either. If you want you have nouveau driers which NVIDIA sorta supports, but they are a piece of crap compared to the "retail" ones. From testing both NVIDIA and AMD drivers for Steam OS i have to say that NVIDIA is lightyears a head of anything AMD or ATI has ever put out on Linux. The drivers are stable, allow for overclocking, have full NVAPI support, a much better OpenGL mini driver (only ones to support 4.3) and are even aware of WINE and similar solutions and optimize it in the driver. Now with NVIDIA buying Transgaming (probably for Tegra based consoles) the support for non-native games will probably even be better, i wont be surprised if enough legal loopholes to be found (Wine has some issues with requiring certain DLL's ;)) to see NVIDIA supports running games with no official linux support through their Geforce Experience software which is now rumored to come out after the trasngaming purchase.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  I'd agree, closed-source nvidia drivers for linux are better than closed-source AMD drivers. I'm just saying, open source AMD drivers in the upstream kernel are better than open-source nvidia (nouveau) drivers in the upstream kernel, even if neither are good enough for serious games from the last decade. I boot to Windows 7 for games. I've had nvidia cards in the past, as well as UT2004 which had a native linux version, and it worked well enough, but performance was still less than half what it was in windows (with the closed-source nvidia driver in linux). And what with xrandr, kernel mode setting, etc, I prefer proper integrated linux support (even without enough 3d acceleration for games).

by ploxiln 11y ago

Zardoz84 11y ago

But the AMD drivers keeps being a piece of shit on Linux ? I know that improve a lot (from buggy desktop to usable), but lags behind NVIDIA drivers or are at similar level. I'm too tired of fight with issues of these drivers, plus AMD have a bad tendency of drop support for old video cards. I can understand that they drop support for desktop old cards, but not should be too fast with notebooks cards, that can't replace the GPU.

dogma1138 11y ago

NVIDIA releases Linux and BSD drivers every month together with the Windows drivers (Linux drivers are released 1 week earlier usually) They aren't GPL but the shader compilers in the drivers are considered "trade secrets" in this industry, AMD doesn't release those under GPL or any other OSS license either. If you want you have nouveau driers which NVIDIA sorta supports, but they are a piece of crap compared to the "retail" ones. From testing both NVIDIA and AMD drivers for Steam OS i have to say that NVIDIA is lightyears a head of anything AMD or ATI has ever put out on Linux. The drivers are stable, allow for overclocking, have full NVAPI support, a much better OpenGL mini driver (only ones to support 4.3) and are even aware of WINE and similar solutions and optimize it in the driver. Now with NVIDIA buying Transgaming (probably for Tegra based consoles) the support for non-native games will probably even be better, i wont be surprised if enough legal loopholes to be found (Wine has some issues with requiring certain DLL's ;)) to see NVIDIA supports running games with no official linux support through their Geforce Experience software which is now rumored to come out after the trasngaming purchase.

ploxiln 11y ago
I'd agree, closed-source nvidia drivers for linux are better than closed-source AMD drivers. I'm just saying, open source AMD drivers in the upstream kernel are better than open-source nvidia (nouveau) drivers in the upstream kernel, even if neither are good enough for serious games from the last decade. I boot to Windows 7 for games. I've had nvidia cards in the past, as well as UT2004 which had a native linux version, and it worked well enough, but performance was still less than half what it was in windows (with the closed-source nvidia driver in linux). And what with xrandr, kernel mode setting, etc, I prefer proper integrated linux support (even without enough 3d acceleration for games).