ATI vs. nVidia graphics

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Dec 2, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:

> On Dec 2, 2010, at 5:44 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
>> 
>> Or is this purely about limiting yourself to 100% pure open source drivers?
> 
> Primarily.  If you go closed-source, both ATI and nVidia have high level support for recent video cards.  It's required for CUDA and Stream.  Then again, if you are doing CUDA or Stream then you need to use the closed-source drivers.

For video playback, nVidia still beats ATI hands-down though. XvBA is
a joke. See also: today's flash player 10.2 beta release with VDPAU
support (and marginally > 0% cpu utilization playing back 1080p flash
under linux w/nvidia's binary driver. yes, you read that right).

> If you want multi-head with nVidia then you have to go closed-source drivers.

Not true.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

> I'm not sure about ATI at this point in time.

The open-source ATI drivers support multi-head too.

> Aside from those, my current understanding and experience is that the recent open-source nv driver is better than the recent open-source radeon driver.

No sane/modern distro should be using the nv driver anymore.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org