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Comment by flabbergasted | Hacker News Reader

Unlike Intel and ATI, Nvidia doesn't play nice with open source developers.

While this is true, nvidia's closed-source drivers do have the virtue of actually working.

(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)

So far as I can tell, I get similar frame-rates under X11 with Wine as Windows users do on the same hardware. Intel's video drivers are wonderful, including for 3D acceleration, it's just their hardware that's lacking.

I must have hallucinated playing 3d games on my intel-based systems. (Of course, performance isn't great, but it doesn't work bad at all, at least in my experience).

Intel has really stepped up in the past few years. But it's not too long ago when their h/w was pretty much unusable in Linux so their track record isn't very good.

It's still much harder to find ATI drivers for Linux than Nvidia drivers.

Wait, what? There are radeon drivers within the open source ecosystem, and AMD also supplies an alternate proprietary driver, bad quality as it is, for those people who find 3D support essential.

You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.

The open source AMD driver has improved a lot over the past couple of years, it's really pretty good. "Pretty good" is unfortunately not good enough for really 3D intensive tasks like newer games, etc. Good enough for the vast majority of desktop tasks though including hardware-accelerated video rendering etc.

The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway.

My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.

What distro are you using? Did you use aticonfig --dual-head to setup your xorg.conf file ?

Mint13 with Cinnamon; not precisely Gnome3 but close enough.

And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.

You didnt answer my question on whether you used aticonfig? Also which card are you using?

There is basically no nvidia drivers available for many modern mobile GPUs on Linux, so I doubt that Nvidia is more linux friendly than ATI/AMD nowadays.

AMD is ruthless about dropping support for older architectures, which hits laptop GPUs especially hard. They're about to drop support for R600 and there's still lower-end devices being sold with those. Fortunately as noted above the AMD open source driver is pretty good, more than good enough for a laptop I would think.

Which GPUs? The only one I can find that they're not supporting yet is the GeForce GTX 680M.

Any that comes with Optimus. Nvidia's blob just don't see them.

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