Linux users: NVIDIA or ATi?

I've heard ATi has cleaned up their act and now their linux drivers are usable.

Is that the case?

Hands down, no questions, no hesitation.

I say this as an ATI owner and as someone who has just spent the past two hours *fixing* a configuration I had running stable for several months. What caused the need to fix this you may ask? Well, I installed the updated ATI drivers, and that, possibly combined with a security update to Xorg 6.8.2, borked everything.

Let me give you an example of the kind of things they did...

In the instructions for the ATI installer, it actually says that the GATOS drivers that allow the video capture functions of A-I-W cards to work will *not* work with the ATI proprietary drivers. (This isn't quite right and is actually a bit stupid, but it does say that, and it does require no small degree of effort and hair pulling to make them work.) Then, the new, improved aticonfig (replaces fglrxconfig) puts a line in your xorg.conf file *enabling* the GATOS drivers and subsequently screwing up everything.

I'm not sure at this point if this was actually the full problem, but I know it was *a* problem. I ended up uninstalling the new drivers and control panel, recompiling my kernel, getting lucky and finding a backed up xorg.conf that worked, and starting over. But damn it was frustrating.

Now that mini-rant over, ATI has gotten better, believe it or not, and when I have it all configured the card I have works very well. I also have no personal experience with nVIDIA graphics and Linux, but I never see the kinds of complaints and problems about their products in a Linux system that I do regarding ATI.

Oh, and I do know that none of the newer high-end ATI cards work well at all in Linux. ATI's current driver doesn't support the features that make those cards desireable. If you have an older card, 9800 and below, it'll work fine with some manual editing of config files.