# [solved] Radeon vs. Geforce: Current status?

## Sujao

It looks like my GPU is broken (blue dots after POST) so I will have to buy a new one. Actually I was going to go forward and get a Geforce straight away but several hardware sites say that at the moment the Radeons are better and cheapter. The problem is that to my knowledge Radeons have bad drivers for linux and it's often a pain in the a. to get them working and many features are not supported. With my Nvidia Geforce I just needed to install nvidia-drivers, setup xorg.conf and thats it. Even x264 hardware decoding worked with the vdpau drivers what I don't want to miss anymore.

So what is the current status with Radeon? Is it as mature as Geforce or should I still buy a Nvidia if I want easy and reliable configuration. I would'nt mind spending a little more for nvidia even if to only support their linux policy.Last edited by Sujao on Thu May 13, 2010 4:59 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## chithanh

GPU accelerated video decode you will presently only get from AMD and Nvidia proprietary drivers (and Intel GMA500, but nobody wants that). The Nvidia driver reportedly works better.

Other than that, Radeon cards up to 4890 will give you out-of-the-box 2D and 3D acceleration with the currently stable open source drivers.

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## Sujao

Thx for the info. It seems I can still use vesa mode, so I'll probably stick with the broken GPU and wait for GeForces to become cheaper/faster.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Sujao wrote:*   

> Thx for the info. It seems I can still use vesa mode, so I'll probably stick with the broken GPU and wait for GeForces to become cheaper/faster.

 

cheaper then what? newer versions of nvidia?

faster then what? radeon?

currently, the fastest gpu afaik is the 480 but it is still doesn't worth while to buy.

currently the best you can do is wait for the either ati closed drivers to improve (probably won't happen) or the open driver to improve (will probably happen when gallium 3D will support newer cards)

imho, for the time being, nvidia is an ok option for the short run for linux, but not for the long ran for both linux and other os as they are being pounded to the ground in sales by ati, not to mention that ati does supports the oss driver whereas nvidia isn't.

imho, you should stick with the broken one until it will die or ati oss drivers will support gallium 3d on newer cards, what ever comes first.

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## Sujao

Hey DaggyStyle,

yeah I didn't write it quite clear. What I meant was that I'll wait for GeForces to have a better price performance ratio. Or as you said for the ati open source driver to support x264 decoding. Of course a completely open driver is better. Working with the vesa driver now I see how some things are much faster then with "nvidia".

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