nVidia vs. ATI card (which one to buy)

chovy · Guru Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 453

Hate to start a flame war, but I've had two nVidia cards which were problematic for me - and that was on windows XP.

One crapped out after about 3 months (I blame that on Fry's), the other I just installed, and there's noticable degradation on the screen resolution with kvm switch (not so on my other pc's connected to the same switch). Also, on XP I could not get the tv tuner card (FX5700) to be recognized.

I'm leaning more toward ATI cards, eventually my 64-bit amd computer will have gentoo running on it (along side XP) with mythtv, and want to get a decent cheap video card.

I will probably buy the WinTV Pro 350 video capture card, as that's what I see most people using with mythtv, instead of an ATI All In Wonder or nVidia FX5700 TV Tuner card.

Any suggestions on a graphics card? 128mb or so. ARe the ATI Drivers getting better? I really don't want to buy an nVidia since I've had problems with both cards.
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papal_authority · Veteran Joined: 31 Mar 2004 Posts: 1823 Location: Canada

I've had nothing but positive experiences with nVidia cards although I've never run them under MS Windows. The FreeBSD and Linux drivers are great. I'm get the impression that ATI still has a ways to go with their Linux drivers.
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djpenguin · Guru Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 386

ATI's linux 3D drivers leave a LOT to be desired, so I wouldn't use an ATI card on any machine where you expect to use 3D acceleration under Linux.

3D support in linux was built around Nvidia, and the result is that Nvidia cards are easy to get working in Linux, whereas ATI cards require a lot more time and effort. From my experiences with a Radeon series card under Windows, I remember that even ATI's Windows driver support left something to be desired. ATI makes very nice hardware, but their driver software lags far behind in terms of usability and stability.

Stick with Nvidia for a headache-free 3D implimentation

caravela · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Aug 2004 Posts: 118

Nvidia, ATI drivers plain suck on linux(i just hope they release a new version before a new xorg release ....)

chovy · Guru Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 453

Is there a list somewhere of which nVidia cards are supported under gentoo?
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djpenguin · Guru Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 386

Nvidia cards use a unified driver package (same driver for every card), thus everything from the Riva line up to the GeForce6 series ought to work with the nvidia-kernel driver.

Vann · Guru Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 357

There's no question on Linux: NVidia all the way. Even if benchmarks show ATI outperforming the comparable NVidia card, the Linux ATI drivers are so poor that NVidia will always do better on Linux.

the_mole · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 9:41 pm Post subject:

This changed on Jan 17.
Now ATI works really fine (hope this will go on in the future)
;-)

allex87 · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:09 pm Post subject:

New ATi drivers aren't bad but they're far from NVidia's... Although I am the owner of an ATi card and acceleration is as good as I would want it in Linux, I must say, go with NVidia... It's better under Linux.. and I think Windows too, although I don't use that much

Alex.

sprite · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:11 pm Post subject:

http://www.petitiononline.com/cgi-htdig/htsearch?restrict=petitiononline.com;config=htdig;method=and;format=builtin-long;sort=score;words=ati

nearly every one of those is about linux & ati...

kmare · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:23 pm Post subject:

as everyone said, go for nvidia... ati drivers are still immature... I think that they started (somehow) to care about linux with the latest drivers (8.8.x). But nvidia drivers are much better, support × extentions that ati won't support for at least a year... eg: RENDER..

I was an ATI fan... but after "nvidia on linux" I'll never switch unless they can prove me that they're much better... (after 2 years I doubt it..)

codergeek42 · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 10:28 pm Post subject:

An older radeon will work wonderfully with Xorg and DRI (i.e., Free/Open-Source driver support). But for practicality reasons, you'd probably be better-suited with an nVidia-based card.
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