NVIDIA Is Better For Closed-Source Linux GPU Drivers, AMD Wins For Open-Source

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 13, 2014 @04:25AM from the best-of-different-worlds dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix last week tested 65 graphics cards on open source drivers under Linux and the best result was generally with the open source AMD Radeon drivers. This week they put out a 35-graphics-card comparison using the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA drivers (with the other 30 cards being too old for the latest main drivers) under Ubuntu 14.04. The winner for proprietary GPU driver support on Linux was NVIDIA, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise given that Valve and other Linux game developers are frequently recommending NVIDIA graphics for their game titles while AMD Catalyst support doesn't usually come to games until later. The Radeon OpenGL performance with Catalyst had some problems, but at least its performance per Watt was respectable. Open-source fans are encouraged to use AMD hardware on Linux while those just wanting the best performance and overall experience should see NVIDIA with their binary driver."

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Re:Just don't upgrade the kernel with nvidia close by jones_supa · 2014-06-13 07:10 · Score: 0, Troll

IMO Windows Registry is way nicer than what Linux has got. In Linux, programs use text files, which are slow and unreliable to parse, and require a separate config file interpreter in each program. Then there are these desktop environment -specific directories like .config, .kde, and .gconf, which just add to the mess. In Windows, you just use the standard API for accessing the registry.
Linux has much nicer package management, Windows has much nicer configuration management.