ATI or nVidia graphic card for new Linux box?

I didn't have too look too long. The first search result I checked was a recent post with a definite answer:

http://www.linux.com/community/forums?func=view&catid=25&id=2695

I'm about to buy a brand new spanking video card for my same-old-brand-new rig
I just wanted to ask which company supports linux drivers better.

It depends: if you want a completely opensource solution, go for the ATI board; the ATI opensource video drivers are *much* more mature than the opensource nvidia drivers. Mind, neither opensource driver works good enough in my opinion.
If you want to allow closed source software being installed, go for NVIDIA. their video driver is imho very good especially compared to ATI's fglrx driver.
I don't know what distro you're running, but opensuse for instance has community repo's (say, online installation trees) which provide the right driver for your rig automatically.
To sum it up: if you want to game,use 3d graphics, want nice desktop effects etc, go for an nvidia board with closed source drivers. if you want to live in 2D land and hate big corporations, go for ATI with the opensource drivers.

I still buy nvidia for my new boxes, while proprietary, their drivers (binary blobs) are the easiest to install. Right now I'm using the Open Source nouveau driver on one of my Fedora installs and am pleasantly pleased with the way that project has progressed.
ATI on the other hand (if you read the assorted distro forums) is problematic in Linux. The fglrx install method in Debian is hit or miss, and the fedora forums are full of ATI driver install problems.
Intel, which has been quite solid in Linux, has recently had problems because of a rewrite of their drivers. Setting the correct graphics acceleration method is a bit tricky at the moment, but their new drivers are suppose to fix the problems, at least I hope so, because I bought a Dell Studio 17 with Intel graphics and I'd like to see their 3D effects stable again.

All in all, I'd vote for nvidia.

As other have said, if you don't care about the closed nature of the nvidia drivers, then go nvidia. fglrx (ati) is a pain and you will always live in troubleland with them. Ati is usually lacking a couple of kernel versons behind most of the time as well, and they get worse if you have a multiple head setup.

Ati can be an option if you plan to use an older card, for r5xx based cards and below, 3d acceleration works out of the box with the OSS driver, so you don't depend on fglrx to get 3d. But all the newer cards are based on r6xx and r7xx chips. There's a branch in the git repository of the radeon driver that have some preliminar support for 3d acceleration, and some people are even using it for some purposes right now, but it's highly experimental stuff and you can only expect pain from them unless you enjoy testing and reporting bugs.

So, the 3d support is coming soon for the ati radeon open source driver, but *right now* nvidia has better support if you don't mind using a close source driver.

Even though ATI open source drivers are better than the open source ones for nvidia, the nvidia proprietary drivers are FAR superior to anything available on Linux for ATI cards. They have made a real effort to provide serious support for Linux and the drivers are first class. For this reason alone I usually recommend nVidia boards for serious Linux graphics needs. Yes, they are, on average a bit more expensive, but not seriously so.

No the ATi drivers are not good enough to use at this point in time. The open source driver only has support for 2D and the propitary does not have support for compositing. That meaning if you want to play any game or use an application that uses OpenGL you will have to turn of your flashy compiz desktop.

This comment is interesting, because it introduces a new problem: how long a nvidia card will be supported by the company:

The ati radeon cards have long been the best gaming graphics cards money can buy.
Both the nvidia and the ati proprietary Linux drivers break quite frequently and if you update and run current, you find yourself on the back foot on occasions in relation to kernel updates.

The truth is that the newer nvidia cards have reasonable non free Linux drivers but older nvidia cards have none that work any more. It seems that nvidia just drop Linux support when they can't be bothered any more. So bare in mind that if you buy nvidia, they may decide to stop releasing a working proprietary driver for your card in three or four years time.

Neither of the free versions of the nvidia and ati Linux drivers have proper 3d support yet, so it's utterly useless at this point to buy a powerful card and try to use those drivers.

I say don't bother with ati or nvidia for maybe two years until the opensource drivers gain 3d support.
It's a well known fact that the Intel graphics drivers are the best among the xorg drivers and although the hardware is slightly underpowered in comparison to ati or nvidia's offerings, built in Intel graphics are your best choice right now. They are actively developed, support 3d and also open source. That means no messing.

same echo here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/what-video-car...

Don't be fooled by ATI's open source support. I'm sure I am not the only one who regrets getting an ATI card. Personally, I don't have a problem running NVIDIA proprietary blob - unlike ATI, Nvidia works well for me.

I haven't checked it for a few months now, but there have been some problems with flgrx drivers. On a box with an ATI card I use radeonhd.

http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/
Interesting discussion dating back to when AMD announced it would release the specs to allow for an open source driver.

A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and "that is better for everybody." Things are looking good on this front.

Even if they do follow through, it remains to be seen if the community will manage to produce a fully-fonctionnal driver out of this. Last time ATI played this card the result was somewhat lacking.

AMD is to be commended if this happens, but a FLOSS driver won't happen overnight. And its silicon is said to be a lot less nice to play with than NVidia's.

A few years back ATI did release specs, the ATI 9200/9250 series (G200?) is the highest for which they did so.

I have a 9250 card and the FLOSS drivers work pretty well for it, including 3D acceleration (such as the card is capable of).

There are already FLOSS drivers for the later cards, based largely on reverse-engineering. With the specs available they should catch up pretty quickly.

Sorta.

They released it under NDA and only to certain people.

Same thing with Intel. From what I remember Intel originally farmed out development to Tungsten Graphics and then brought them into the fold.

Intel's graphics are definately open source, but they aren't as open as they should be. I bought lots of Intel hardware because of this and I've recommended it to other people.

Intel did a good thing releasing source code, but like most things everybody does, it can get better.

(to the other people: )
THIS IS GOOD NEWS!!

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, this is the BEST thing you could hope to get!

The ATI proprietary drivers are going to be a minefield of nasty NDA agreements, cross licensing and all sorts of other stuff. Companies involved in those drivers are going to be numbered in the dozens. SGI, Microsoft, Nvidia, S3, etc etc. Some of them are very anti-open source, very pro-patents in their legal stances. Some of them have sold their patents and copyright assists to other companies, the legality of everything is going to be very uncertain.

In other words: The drivers are not AMD's to give away. Realise that the legal/political issues revolving around closed source can screw over developers as much as end users. (Free software is about liberating both the user and the developer.)

So in order to give away the source code to the drivers AMD needs to make new drivers. If they are going to open source it, then why not get 3rd party developers involved from the start?

Makes sense to me!!!

Ra-ra-ra Open source is starting to win in the 3D graphics arena.

http://airlied.livejournal.com/50187.html

It's definitely more than what you say. AMD is giving access to the engineering staff to help out, as well as working to clear out old NDA issues and help get code out there. This isn't just a vaporware promise, as code has already been worked on under the new model before this public announcement.

I'm not going to quote all the comments. Many insightful tidbits in that old thread. Informative.

All in all, AMD delivered what they promissed and more... but two years later, the open source driver have not yet reached the maturity of the closed one and 3D support seems to be lacking.

Oh well, a few more insightful comments from the above thread:

I believe one of the major bug-bears of the FOSS crowd for some time has been lack of hardware specs for graphics chipsets. Intel is to be commended in the way they have approached this area and are rightly reaping the benefits of their openness. Even though AMD/ATI may only be responding to Intel's moves out of fear the end result is that the consumer wins. We are now in a situation where 2 out of 3 of the largest graphics chipset vendors are (or very soon will be) working in a manner compatible with our ethos. Every step in the right direction must be applauded. We must be vocal in our support of those that help us. Let's reserve our cynicism for the future, today let us praise AMD for their foresight.

Actually, "we will supply specs" is all I ask for. In some ways it's even better than getting a driver. If we write a driver to the specs, and it works, then we know the specs are good. We'll know everything we need to maintain that driver. By contrast, a driver from the vendor will have been based partly on undocumented in-house knowledge.
I don't think hardware vendors should feel pressured to supply a Linux driver. That's a lot of hassle and it will discourage them from supporting Linux at all. Just the specs, please.

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302

Back at the Red Hat Summit, Henri Richard said that AMD (and the former ATI) were going to come up with a plan to better support open source. Today we see the results of that promise and I have to say I’m incredibly impressed with the commitment that they have decided to make. I know that this was a struggle inside of AMD and I want to send a personal thanks to the people who worked hard to make this a reality. They deserve full credit and our thanks.
OK, to the meat of the story. AMD is making the commitment to do two major things:
To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets. This will be done in full collaboration with the open source community and will have the direct participation of hackers from companies like Red Hat and Novell.
To release documentation that anyone can use to build and support drivers for their chips.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=18017

A comprehensive review of the performance on Linux of an nvidia card (Inno3D GeForce GTX 260 OC 896 MB - the modern 216-core variety), and an ATI one (PowerColor PCS+ HD4870 1GB).

Final Thoughts
So who is the winner of this heated battle then? You are - the consumer. Whilst NVIDIA still came out on top, it did so with only the smallest of margins in most cases - and you can feel confident that owning a Radeon is no longer a blocker to a decent experience in Linux.
That said, there are (as always) some little things. Firstly, many people would rather not need to use a closed-source driver at all. Intel users get a decent out-of-the-box experience with full 3D on cards that aren't Poulsbo-based, and in theory ATI users do too - in practice I was greeted with a white screen when using the Free ATI driver on the Radeon HD 4870 (reverting to the basic VESA driver allowed me to log in).
Another minor nitpick is that whilst with the GeForce connected I can run the system's text consoles and bootup animation at 1920x1200, ATI doesn't support widescreen modes at boot. This could be an issue in the future with "Plymouth project" which plans to give a clean boot procedure in consistent high resolution, with no ugly mode changes - then again, Plymouth will probably never work with closed-source drivers anyway.
Despite the niggles, however, I think ATI has earnt plenty of praise for its progress - the company is certainly in a position to compete now, rather than being an also-ran. Which means for me, I can stop pushing friends and family towards NVIDIA in the vain hope that they might want to use Linux - knowing that ATI doesn't cripple them.

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-net/161691-articles-ati-vs-nvidia-linux-sh...

Personally I was not that impressed with the review. It did what it said on the tin, but nothing more. It left a lot of un-answerd questions.

Top of my list, would be some information on the status of open source drivers for those cards. I know that OSS drivers for older ATI cards are fairly good, and support 3D, thanks to active input from ATI. Last time I heard the open drivers for nVidia cards where 2D only, and there was a reverse engineering project to write 3D drivers for nVidia, but that the project was receiving no help from nVidia and so was proceeding very slowly. Updates would have been good.

Seconldy, it would be good to get an idea of the relative performance of windows and linux drivers, This can be done by running the same benchmark on both operating systems and comparing the numbers. Last time I checked, nVidia had very similar performance on windows and linux but ATI was significantly slower on linux. Is that still the case?

Thirdly, I would say that if you only write one Linux GPU review, then it should not be for high end cards. Few people build linux systems for gaming, and not many for CAD, more likey they want to build a general desktop system or media centre, and want a 3D card for compiz, media playback or occasional games, so they are much more likey to spec a mid range card or low cost second hand card from another system or ebay. For that reason it is much more important to know about how those cards perform and are supported under linux than the latest high end cards.

The reviewer provided answers to those question in the same thread.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=31725
Another vote of confidence in a recent post for nvidia over ATI. Moreover, it's on a Linux Mint forum. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which I use.

I always liked the ideal behind The Linux Documentation Project.
It's sad that in my research, I find this documentation that is so clearly outdated (last update: 2004)
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Gamers-HOWTO/x608.html

I still have at the back of my mind a project to do something about Linux documentation in general.