AMD vs. nVidia binary driver?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 06:06:38PM -0800, William Park wrote:
> I only have nVidia graphic cards, and I use their binary drivers.  In fact, 
> installing Kernel, nVidia, and VirtualBox (in that order) has become sort of 
> habit.
> 
> How are things on AMD side?  Are ATI binary drivers simple to install, like 
> nVidia?  I'm, of course, assuming that ATI binary driver is better than 
> open-source one.

ATI's drivers have often been buggy (to the point of starting X crashes
the box hard).  Last time I had the misfortunate of trying to use them,
you had to manually put '24 bit colour' in the X config, or the driver
would crash because it didn't support 8 bit colour.  Of course the next
driver version which supports newer X versions and kernels obsoleted
support for a card they are still selling.

ATI makes great hardware.  I used to use them a lot.  Then things started
needing drivers, and that's not something ATI has ever done well.

I would actually assume the open source driver for an ATI is way more
stable than the binary ones, but probably has a lot less features too.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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