On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:16 PM, Juan Erbes
2012/11/12 Claudio Freire
: Sounds quite offtopic, but from someone that develops GPU-intensive games, nVidia's OpenGL drivers are far more mature than ATI's, crash a lot less when strained, and are a lot more robust regarding shader capabilities. For development, I prefer nVidia every time.
You are a game developer for Linux desktops?
I'm not, and other guys that really knows about Linux, say the opposite than You:
"During the Q&A, a person asks why NVIDIA does not play well with Linux. Torvalds explained shortly that NVIDIA has been one of the WORST companies to work with Linux project — which makes it even worse that NVIDIA ships a high number of chips for Android devices (which use Linux inside). Torvalds even summarized that ('Nvidia, fuck you!') in a playful manner. What has been your experience on NVIDIA drivers with Linux?"
You missed Linus's point. That nVidia is uncooperative and OSS-unfriendly doesn't make their drivers bad. They're good. They're just closed source, and they try not to contribute to the kernel.
However, a DKMS for ATI's Catalyst would indeed be quite useful. We get tons of bug reports for ATI that sound like ATI open source drivers issues, and we can't easily tell people to test with Catalyst since installing it is not for newbies. This really hurts bug hunting. Having it as a package would help a lot there.
Years ago, while I used Nvidia video, until I burned two Nvidia cards, and one Nvidia/Nforce chipset, I installed the Nvidia propietary drivers in the same way than I install the ATI Catalyst drivers the last years, and when I changed from the Nvidia propietary drivers to the ATI Catalyst drivers (because the hardware change), I hatte less problems with the Catalyst installer, than with Nvidia.
Again, nVidia's installer is buggy and troublesome, yes. And it seldom works with the latest kernel. Again, this is nVidia being uncooperative. But when you make them work, they work a ton better than ATI's.
Today the ATI open source drivers, perform very well, I changed only because under 64 bits, I could'nt use the Google Earth with it.
AMD open source drivers crash (kill X) when presented with some unexpected shaders/API usage. I don't own an AMD GPU so I can't debug myself, if I did, I would file bugs. And I cannot afford to buy one GPU of each maker to do the testing. But our users report tons of those crashes, both in the open source drivers and in Catalyst. They're even worse than intel drivers.
Regards, Juan -- USA LINUX OPENSUSE QUE ES SOFTWARE LIBRE, NO NECESITAS PIRATEAR NADA Y NI TE VAS A PREOCUPAR MAS POR LOS VIRUS Y SPYWARES:
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