Re: [SLUG] NVIDIA vs ATi

From: Derek Glidden (dglidden@illusionary.com)
Date: Mon Jul 08 2002 - 16:54:36 EDT

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 16:38, Russ Wright wrote:
> Hi All!
>
> Need some help. I'm replacing my venerable linux laptop with a more up to
> date model. I'm down to two choices. All options are about the same however
> one has an NVIDIA GeForce video card and the other has an ATI Radeon video
> card.
>
> OK so when I'm not slaving away over web development I like to goof off by
> playing Unreal Tournament. Xfree has drivers for both, and Nvidia actually
> released their own modules.
>
> So now my question, what is your experience with this sort of stuff? Which is
> better ATI or NVIDIA?

My take in a nutshell:

nVidia
------
Pros: best performance, period
Cons: binary-only driver; occasional, irregular reports of instability;
Linux users are dependent on the whims of nVidia for driver upgrades and
support of future chipsets

ATI 

---
Pros: open source driver; pretty good performance; will get better over
time as the driver stabilizes and improves
Cons: occasional, irregular reports of instability; hardwarewise, the
best performance from a Radeon chip isn't going to match the best
performance of a like-generation nVidia chip; any future improvements to
the driver are assuming the driver developers won't get sidetracked by
something sexier (see: Matrox chipset support); Linux users are
dependent on the whims of ATI for support of future chipsets

It really comes down to, in simplest form: do you want performance or
open-source?

-- 
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usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
    | extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec - 

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