AMD vs. nVidia binary driver?

[Thomas Milne]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

Also, wasn't there something the other day about NVidia having the
only Linux drivers that were stable enough to do hardware decoding of
h264/Flash? I'm pretty sure that's what I read, don't know how
applicable that is right now.

-- 
TBM
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