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Arakis

Member

From: Hamminkeln - Germany

Registered: 2013-08-11

Posts: 46

Website

Best GPU support: AMD or Nvidia? (only free driver, no proprietary)

Hey,
i want to buy a new computer for my brother, he (and i) use linux only (=no windows). In history, i had never bad experience with AMD GPUs. But now the question is, what is better supported by linux (when using the free/open source driver, not the proprietary!), AMD or Nvidia?

The linux machine will used for working, and gaming (30% native linux games, 70% wine-emulation-games).

Greetings,
Sebastian

Last edited by Arakis (2014-01-17 13:16:20)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,562

Website

Re: Best GPU support: AMD or Nvidia? (only free driver, no proprietary)

As you've restricted it to free drivers I can very confidently say AMD.  If you were looking for all the bells and whistles from the closed source drivers, there could be some debate, and nvidia might come out on top; but for the open source drivers, go with ati.

I have several computers running the free ati drivers and they work perfectly without any hassle at all: just install xf86-video-ati and you're done.

I've also used the open source nvidia drivers, and while they tend to work 'out of the box' also, I've never been really pleased with the results.

I have not used closed source drivers on either hardware.

EDIT: I have heard rumors about nvidia starting to work more actively with the open source community.  So things may change in the future.  But for now I'd stick with ati.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-01-17 13:26:28)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

Arakis

Member

From: Hamminkeln - Germany

Registered: 2013-08-11

Posts: 46

Website

Re: Best GPU support: AMD or Nvidia? (only free driver, no proprietary)

Hey Trilby,
i'm not "restricted" to it, but i had lots of bad experience with "closed source" products after an kernel update. And i want to use the free drivers from conviction.

So, are there any "modern"/brand new AMD cards, that are maybe not fully supported?
Are dual GPU cards (2 GPUs on one card) fully supported?

Greetings,
Sebastian

Last edited by Arakis (2014-01-17 13:35:14)

sekret

Member

Registered: 2013-07-22

Posts: 287

Re: Best GPU support: AMD or Nvidia? (only free driver, no proprietary)

You can look up the supported features right here.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Best GPU support: AMD or Nvidia? (only free driver, no proprietary)

Just for clarification: According to the Free Software Foundation, there are no free software drivers for either Radeon or Nvidia video cards that provide accelerated graphics, since they all use "binary blobs". There are only open source drivers.

Since this thread is half technical and half ideological, I thought this would be an appropriate place to point this out.

Bonus lesson: The opposite of "open source software" is "closed source software". The opposite of "free software" is "non-free software".