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."
Re:Just don't upgrade the kernel with nvidia close (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu has had its own method of dealing with nVidia drivers for about 7 years now. If you really want to go with the official nVidia driver (rather than the ubuntu-provided package which, IIRC, automatically handles kernel upgrades), all you have to do is cd to where you stuck the nVidia bin installer, and "sudo ./run" it. But really, if you're manually going outside of the package management system, you should learn how it works rather than complaining that you got burned,
Not to mention that the "dumped to console" was ALSO fixed many, many years ago (8.04?) as part of their bulletproof-X initiative.
AMD Wins For Open-Source (Score:5, Informative)
In last week's testing of 65 GPUs on the open-source Linux drivers, the winner overall was the AMD Radeon graphics cards: they were the least problematic (though several Radeon GPUs still ran into different problems) and they delivered the best performance (including generally the performance-per-Watt).
Can confirm. The open source Radeon driver has been improving greatly. A bit surprisingly, Radeon hardware is actually starting to become a quite good choice for a Linux user.
Re:Just don't upgrade the kernel with nvidia close (Score:4, Informative)
Ubuntu has had its own method of dealing with nVidia drivers for about 7 years now. If you really want to go with the official nVidia driver (rather than the ubuntu-provided package which, IIRC, automatically handles kernel upgrades), all you have to do is cd to where you stuck the nVidia bin installer, and "sudo ./run" it. But really, if you're manually going outside of the package management system, you should learn how it works rather than complaining that you got burned,
Not to mention that the "dumped to console" was ALSO fixed many, many years ago (8.04?) as part of their bulletproof-X initiative.
On ubuntu 14.04 there is a "driver manager" in system settings. This lets you easily switch between the nvidia binary driver and nouveau (open source).
Re:I believe it (they're improving) (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Just don't upgrade the kernel with nvidia close (Score:4, Informative)
That "driver manager" was added somewhere between versions 6.10 and 7.10. It not only installs the nVidia driver, it handles re-installing it every time you upgrade kernels (though, to be fair, it did still occasionally break).