Best Linux graphics drivers - ATI or Nvidia?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

What's the state of play as far as Linux drivers go? Historically, Nvidia has had better Linux drivers, but I know ATI has done some work in that area recently. So what is the current preferred company for Linux drivers?

[martrox]

nVidias drivers are still best at linux. ATI is getting better, but I'd not go there yet......

[rashly]

I've had much better experiences with nvidia's Linux drivers, even recently.

While Ati are definitely making improvements, nvidia still puts out the best linux drivers and owns the linux market.

[Saem]

They're both mediocre. Nvidia's are slightly better in regards to getting somethings working but, they're both not all that stable when it comes to say render, composite and xgl.

Still, if I had a choice, I'd go with an older nvidia card -- old because the drivers are likely more stable.

[Chalnoth]

Well, for games, my system with a 6600 GT is completely stable under Linux. The only instabilities I've had in the past with regards to nVidia's drivers have been with respect to the choice of agpgart (when using an nForce motherboard). I seem to remember that building the gart into the kernel and using that one fixed my instability issues. Now, of course, it's not an issue at all as it's all PCI Express.

[wireframe]

Would anyone mind elaborating on what exactly is the problem with ATI's driver? I keep considering this when buying video cards (Nvidia's GNU/Linux drivers have worked very well for me unless there have been documented kernel incompatibilites) and I keep forgetting to put an ATI card (I only have some very basic ones that mainly work for 2D) in there to test.

From what I understand the ATI drivers are just problematic to install, but once they are installed they work fine. Is this correct?

[Saem]

Honestly, a lot is distro specific. For instance, SUSE seems to maintain a very good kernel in terms of hardware "just working" and things being stable. They're probably the gold standard in this regard.

ATI, last month if I'm not mistaken released a GUI based driver installer as part of a driver update, actually, IIRC, that's the only change they made to the, 'driver'. So they're much easier to install.

http://rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=61 That's where you'll want to go if you want to know about specific cards; moreover, cards + mobo + distro interactions.

[Ragemare]

Installing ATi's drivers isn't too hard, unless you want to run 3D apps. That is to say, getting 2D working is pretty painless, but getting 3D is a great big pain in the arse.

Last time I bothered trying, I had to recompile the kernal and install one or two patches to the kernal module (which you need for 3D to work). After messing around with it for ages I managed to get it working in a few games e.g tuxracer, but in games like NWN it was just a stuttery mess and the pixel shadeing didn't work. I tried using the internal and external AGP drivers, but it made no difference.

Does the new ATi driver have support for shaders now?

[Chalnoth]

Installing ATi's drivers isn't too hard, unless you want to run 3D apps. That is to say, getting 2D working is pretty painless, but getting 3D is a great big pain in the arse.
I had the problem that it wanted to totally rewrite my XF86config-4 file (now xorg.conf). This was exceedingly annoying because I seem to remember I had problems using my mouse properly afterwards, and thus manually copied the ATI-specific sections into my old config file. This was annoying beyond belief.

I like NV's installation much, much better, where you just have to change a couple of lines in the config file, with the rest of the configuration done through their own GUI utility (I even liked it better before the GUI utility existed, since settings like FSAA and Anisotropic filtering were set by environment variables, and could be changed without restarting X).

[Nite_Hawk]

One other thing to consider is that R300 based cards have opensource 3D drivers being actively developed at r300.sourceforge.net.

It's one of the only reasons I'm still considering ATI cards. As much as I disklike nVidia for the crap they pulled with the NV30, they seem to devote a lot more resources to getting their drivers working. Still, if I could have opensource drivers...

Nite_Hawk

[Saem]

The opensource ATI drivers are plenty slow compared to ATI's actual drivers.

I suggesting just dling a distro like SUSE Pro, you can freely and legally get it off bit torrents. It makes proprietary drivers and nearly anything much easier.

[Jimmers]

It seems like ATi has a ways to go as far as drivers go.

This (http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2302&p=4)review from anand in December shows the X800 Pro getting roundly trounced by a fx5700u. More recently, linuxhardware.org threw up a review (http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/29/1240224&mode=thread) of ATi's current driver, and although I disagree with them comparing a X800 vanilla to a 6800GT (would have like a 6600GT or so), it seems stuff is still broken, AA in peticular. With drivers like this, I doubt I'll ever see an ATi card in my computer (ibook excepted).

[Nite_Hawk]

The opensource ATI drivers are plenty slow compared to ATI's actual drivers.

I suggesting just dling a distro like SUSE Pro, you can freely and legally get it off bit torrents. It makes proprietary drivers and nearly anything much easier.

I actually don't care about speed that much (It would certainly be nice...), I'm much more concerned right now about compatability. with the XeGL being actively developed, I think the opensource drivers are going to become much more important soon. ATI has historically been so slow to support the new open standards (do they even work with composite yet?) that I doubt they will provide a standalone driver anytime soon.

Also, the opensource drivers have been advancing at a pretty amazing pace considering the resources they have. I wouldn't be suprised to see them on par with ATI's drivers in a year or two.

Nite_Hawk

[Saem]

XGL is at the very least a year away. Before that we're going to see EXA.

No, I don't think ATI has composite right, it's rather buggy IIRC.

[Hector]

Getting 3d with fglrx is easy. Just compile the kernel module and load it at boot time by adding a line in /etc/modules o wherever the file is in your distro. Just be sure to have linux headers and gcc installed (and that header version and gcc matches the ones in your running kernel).

If you use a debian based distro, there is a external repository with binary drivers already compiled for a good bunch of kernels. Look here for more info http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//xoomer.virgilio.it/flavio.stanchina/debian/fglrx-installer.html&ei=mnAGQ-eSCpaEiAKvp436DQ

I'm using now a gforce 6200 TC and the latest and the greatest nvidia drivers (7676). Well, it runs like crap, and for some reason there is no xv extension (whereas with the radeon drivers it worked just fine).

The trends are changing. Just take a look in nvidia's linux forum. Lots of bugs (some have been hanging around for more than a year) and lots of unhappy people.

Whatever the card you buy, it will work ok, but don't expect great drivers becouse they are at the very best mediocre.

[Ragemare]

I have my ATi drivers set up right and I have done everything that I have seen suggested on the interweb. However 3D apps seem to have very limited bandwidth or something, I have an nForce motherboard which I suspect is the problem.

Programs with simple geometry and no textures run at thousands of frames per second, but when you get up to a certain complexity the frame rate plumets to around 20 frames then stays the same up untill a certain level of complexity where it drops again to 2 frames per second.

Personally I'm pointing my finger at the AGP modules (tried both as already mentioned). It claims to be running in PCI mode on the ATi control panel, I'm not sure if it always says that or if there's something amiss here.