On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, English_Mohican wrote:
I know that up until about 6 month ago, ATI drivers were not considered
as good as NVidia ones.
[...]
Does anyone have views based on current real data or is it all just the
collected wisdom of the ages
ATI driver quality certainly has improved recently. However, I just bought
an ATI card and as much as I'd like to recommend ATI (with the fglrx
driver) I cannot.
1) Gaming compatibility in Wine is mediocre at best [1].
2) 2D support is quite bad [2]. Even konsole/gterm feel slow.
3) Instability is definitely still an issue. For example, while Xine does
not _generally_ crash anymore with fglrx (google for "xine fglrx"), I
experienced more than one system crash when using Xine for video playback.
mplayer looks better but still this doesn't exactly raise confidence.
I tested with both the HD 3200 and HD 3850 chipset and fglrx 8.11.
For older cards that are supported through the "radeon" X driver 2) and 3)
probably do not apply. free3d.org even recommends X800/X850 cards if you
want true OSS spirit. Still no good Wine gaming experience with that
though.
I really hope that things keep improving since I'm definitely not a fan of
NVidia.
Regards
[1]
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-a96989ff3303c1f6c35a1f85e0680b7f6bcfd16f
[2]
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7#c24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fglrx#Criticism
