I'm always amazed when I see stuff like this. Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too. Neither company is capable of producing quality drivers, yet fanboys still want to insist one of the turds is made of gold.
I think it's like hard drives. You have a bad experience with one manufacturer and jump ship, and subconsciously justify that decision to yourself as rational because of how bad the experience was, not because the manufacturer you're jumping to is any better.
As an owner of many Nvidia cards, I find they crash infrequently, and when they do it's because:
* I was running Windows 8 Preview and pre-release Nvidia drivers
* There was some sort of hardware problem with my systems
I have used four ATI/AMD graphics cards over the years. Not all of them were negative experiences, but none of them were relatively more positive than using Nvidia hardware.
Counterpoint - ive found amd drivers to be pretty good on linux and they support multiple rotated monitors and color matching across multiple monitors much better than nvidia.
I've been running a GTX 680 on Windows 7 for the past year, and count 0 crashes, none from the desktop nor games, though I'm been playing fewer and fewer games these days.
Before that, I had an ATI HD 5870 for over a year. I had about 3 crashes on the desktop, some that lost me work. The anger from losing work is what I remember most strongly, and made me vow not to buy ATI next time.
Before that, an 8800 GTX. I had 0 crashes from the desktop over several years.
I was running Nouveau drivers on the 670 for no more than 60 seconds before it crashed.
I've had both, non-consecutively over 6 different cards over the years. I've not had any large problems at all, and my current GTX 670 has been performing like a champ for about 15 months now, no video crashes.
This is still a reason to cause upset though. A small minority of linux users actually care about GPU programming and 3D acceleration and rely on proprietary drivers. Nouveau is improving but nowhere near commercial grade (this is largely Nvidia's fault as well).
I don't know. ATI has been "playing nice with the Linux community" for several years now, and their free drivers still don't approach the performance of the proprietary drivers for most cards (cards 3-4 generations old are starting to perform comparably on both drivers; newer cards are still much slower with the free drivers).
I think it's more about resources -- NVIDIA and ATI have lots of money that they put into driver improvements and maintenance, and the radeon and nouveau maintainers primarily have free time after work, occasionally with one or two full-time contributors. If we are serious about open-source driver platforms, we need to figure out how to allocate comparable resources. Some easily accessible tutorials on 3D driver development would probably be helpful.
Neither company ever plans to see an open-source driver rival their proprietary within a few years of a card's release, despite their "commitments" and "assistance". ATI's officially stated strategy is that they provide documentation so that the OSS drivers can provide basic compatibility and functionality, and that their proprietary driver should be used by anyone who has actual performance needs. They're basically offloading the onerous maintenance of previous generation hardware on the community.
The point is that nvidia is not especially bad. They've graciously given us the only consistently decent video driver on Linux for 10+ years now, despite its closed nature. Let's try not to be too hard on them.
AMD has played nice enough for people to release a stable free driver for their cards, but they haven't released enough information for a fast 3D driver.
Right, and people also have released a stable free driver for nvidia cards. ATI made it slightly easier, but the point was that neither one has really embraced the OSS driver scene, and neither one has "played nice" to an extent that deserves special commendation.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm ungrateful for the help that ATI offered the implementers of drivers for its cards, but I think when we take all the facts in balance it comes out in a wash or even with nvidia slightly ahead: nvidia has been consistently producing a high-quality, near-performance-parity driver for Linux for a very, very long time now, and it's almost always compatible with new kernel and Xorg versions prior to their release. ATI has given docs for basic functionality in the free drivers, but they've utterly failed to produce good, performant drivers for Linux machines, closed or free, and in fact they are now on the verge of being two Xorg releases behind.
nvidia may not have "committed to help the open-source community" until recently, but they've done a great service for Linux by being the only vendor to provide consistent, solid, high-performance drivers for Xorg and the kernel. Intel has shaped up recently and gone full-bore OSS, but nvidia has a much longer track record of good [closed] *nix support.
Do people really do much heavy lifting with OpenCL/CUDA using cards that they are also using to actually drive browsers? Seems to me like if you are doing serious work with that sort of thing, you probably have dedicated cards for that (if not straight up using Nvidia Tesla cards or similar).
I don't use OpenCL often enough to justify the expense of a dedicated card, but, when I do use it, it's a life saver to be able to simply run the code on the CAD workstation.
as a developer, whose primary role is in GPGPU programming, i can't give you an accurate answer.
i can tell you, however, that the specialist cards typically are only in super-computers. consumer GPUs are typically faster, and significantly cheaper than their HPC counterparts.
Probably, but that's just one more reason for them not caring about 4 monitor support in non-Windows drivers. From what I've gathered from mailing lists chatter, the very reason Nvidia maintains Linux and FreeBSD drivers is OpenCL/CUDA related work, apparently some big customers demand this (but since I don't really have a source for that, take it with a grain of salt).
