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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes, another major step taken! I love how the whole world switches to Linux. Now I hope they start to leverage the GPU driver companies into better Linux support. At least on my computer it's still complicated as hell to get everything running and even then the performance is quite below of what Windows drivers would get done.

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With Vulkan, there will be a lot less to providing quality drivers; Of course Intel has been really good with their drivers for about five years or so(and we know there's already a Vulkan driver for Intel hardware that will be released along with the spec)

Their linux OpenGL drivers often outperform their Windows drivers.

As for AMD, the open source Radeon drivers are pleasant to work with, and on some hardware perform as well as Catalyst.

I have to agree that the free and open radeonsi driver is so much more hazzle-free than catalyst on either platform. Still, the driver reliably kills my system in some games, in others texture is missing.

That's quite interesting. The reason I bought my laptop with a secondary NVidia card was because I heard AMD on linux should be aweful. Did that change or did I hear it wrong or something? Getting a secondary NVidia card working is a pain in the butt, at least from my experience.

AMD is better at providing documentation needed to write open-source drivers, nVidia is better at providing a high-quality closed-source driver. From what I understand nVidia's closed-source driver is still the best for gaming and other intensive 3D applications followed by AMD's closed-source driver.

The open-source drivers are not on the same performance level as the closed-source drivers, though the AMD open-source driver can be classified as "usable" (or better) in most contexts whereas the nVidia open-source driver has many issues since it depends far more on reverse-engineering the GPU's programming interface. Intel has the best open source driver of all of the desktop vendors (since the open source driver is their official driver) but its use for anything 3D is constrained by the relatively weak performance of their GPUs.

AMD is less of a nightmare on linux than it used to be. I still wince when I'm forced to install fglrx drivers on a user's PC, and it's still a huge pain in the butt to upgrade (especially on Arch), but at least you'll crash less than you used to. I still wouldn't recommend fglrx on a stable production system (after all, it's only been 10+ years, which isn't long enough for AMD to make stable drivers), but if you need 3D gaming, fglrx is still 250% faster than the free drivers.

AMD's open source drivers are better but NVidia's closed source drivers blow them out of the water. NVidia is the way to go for Linux unless you care enough about free software to not use their drivers.

Games on nVidia have always been faster for me on Linux as well as far more stable.

But at least for me it takes a long time after every major Ubuntu release before I can get it working, and it's always more magic than real understanding. The most painful is that I have to do that every 6 months. Doing it once would be acceptable. So often I just use the onbaord Intel chip because it just works. But with many games it runs so hot that even my laptop screen gets a black mark on the side where the Intel chip is.

>> But at least for me it takes a long time after every major Ubuntu release before I can get it working

7 years with Ubuntu, I don't see that, what is it you're doing that makes it so difficult for you?

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