Ubuntu: Karmic Koala 9.10, should I buy you an nVidia or ATI video card?

Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by Dragos in Operating Systems, Ubuntu

ATI sucks, for real!

Definitely an nVidia graphic card. Why? Because AMD is very frivolous when it comes to support its legacy video cards. I don’t think that a 3 years old video card should be considered obsolete, and dropped being supported. I am an unlucky ATI card user (Radeon x1950 GT) that runs only on 10% of this chipset’s performance. Yes you heard it right! Even though there are the open source drivers for video cards that are no longer supported by AMD, these still do not compare with the official fglrx driver. This driver will not work under Karmic Koala, because it needs a Linux kernel of version 2.6.28, whereas Karmic is built on Linux kernel 2.6.31. One note: do not try to downgrade your Linux kernel on Karmic in order to use the fglrx driver unless you’re a very experienced Linux user. It’s just that you have a very high probability to damage your system.

Why nVidia then? Because the developers from nVidia do really care of their products and their clients and you will find much better driver support from them than from ATI AMD. Unless you are planning to buy the latest super-puper model video card model from ATI, do consider getting an nVidia one. You’ll save time and some nerves (but not money, AFAIK).

Still wanna get an ATI card? Here are some heart-breaking stats from glxgears with my system (Radeon x1950 GT, AMD x2 5200+ Dual Core 2.6GHz, 4GB Ram @ 667MHz):

dragos@dragos-desktop:~$ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
15676 frames in 5.0 seconds
16040 frames in 5.0 seconds
15946 frames in 5.0 seconds
15940 frames in 5.0 seconds

3000FPS from glxgears with such great specs? That is shi*ty performance if you ask me. On Intrepid Ibex (when fglrx was still supported) I was getting 120K+ FPS.. And yes, for Linux gamers, Nexuiz is slow at times and crashes when playing with an ATI card in combination with the open-source drivers.

                    
                    

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