NVIDIA Is Better For Closed-Source Linux GPU Drivers, AMD Wins For Open-Source 185
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix last week tested 65 graphics cards on open source drivers under Linux and the best result was generally with the open source AMD Radeon drivers. This week they put out a 35-graphics-card comparison using the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA drivers (with the other 30 cards being too old for the latest main drivers) under Ubuntu 14.04. The winner for proprietary GPU driver support on Linux was NVIDIA, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise given that Valve and other Linux game developers are frequently recommending NVIDIA graphics for their game titles while AMD Catalyst support doesn't usually come to games until later. The Radeon OpenGL performance with Catalyst had some problems, but at least its performance per Watt was respectable. Open-source fans are encouraged to use AMD hardware on Linux while those just wanting the best performance and overall experience should see NVIDIA with their binary driver."
Ex-Valve Rich disagreed: Intel was more open (Score:5, Interesting)
The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality [blogspot.hu]
TL:DR;
Vendor A nVidia - driver errs on the side of "make it work" vs GL spec
Vendor B AMD - conforms to the OpenGL spec, but is buggy, inconsistent performance
Vendor C Intel - best open source driver, but performance doesn't compete with nVidia or AMD
Vendor A
Vendor B
A complete hodgepodge, inconsistent performance, very buggy, inconsistent regression testing, dysfunctional driver threading that is completely outside of the dev's official control. Unfortunately this vendor's GPU is pretty much standard and is quite capable hardware wise, so you can't ignore these guys even though as an organization they are i
Re:AMD Wins For Open-Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad that for a majority of users, Linux isn't an OS that they should be using to begin with...
Nonsense. The vast majority of users these days just need a working browser. My mom, dad, and sister all run Linux. Only my sister seems to even be aware that it's not Windows. Simple fact is they know to click on the Chrome logo (same one a Windows user uses) to bring up the browser and they're off. I don't have to worry about fixing any malware that does crop up, and in the event that they DO have a problem I can easily SSH into the machine and tunnel through to a VNC server to look at things remotely.
As a matter of fact its the mid-range skillset users who seem to have the most trouble with Linux. For basic users it covers all of their use cases. For the geeky power users they don't mind getting their hands dirty and getting creative to make things work. The mid-range users though want to do semi-complex things but get frustrated when it doesn't work exactly the same way in Linux.
Re:Just don't upgrade the kernel with nvidia close (Score:2, Interesting)
text files, which are slow and unreliable to parse
require a separate config file interpreter in each program
[user]-specific diretories like .config, .kde, and .gconf,... just add to the mess
None of this is true. Stop believing everything about Linux you hear from your local Microsoft retailer. Drop the prejudice against the people you consider "try hards" and figure out why they're trying so hard and what it is they're trying to do.
IMO Windows Registry is way nicer than what Linux has got.
This would be considered a reasonable and well-informed decision if the Windows Registry wasn't the most twisted and corrupted unreliable piece of garbage-ware ever conceived and any of your above arguments about Linux were even remotely educated.