nVidia/AMD - Proprietary/Open-Source Drivers?

[BRM]

On Wednesday, January 7, 2015 6:52 AM, Jesse Palser <jessepalsermailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
 

> Hi,
> 
> I installed Kubuntu 14.04 L.T.S. 64Bit onto two different desktops.
> I am confused about proprietary and open-source display drivers.
> 
> On my Intel/nVidia desktop, after the O.S. is installed I am prompted to 
> install
> nVidia proprietary display driver which I do and all is well.
> 
> On my AMD/AMD desktop, after the O.S. is installed I am NOT prompted to 
> install
> AMD proprietary display driver?
> 
> So everything is good on the Intel/nVidia desktop, but not on AMD/AMD 
> desktop.
> Are the AMD proprietary display drivers bad?
> Are the open-source AMD drivers OK?
> (can I play 3D Windows games under WINE?)
> 
Well, there is a big difference between the nVidia Proprietary (nvidia*) and Open Source (nouveau) drivers, and the AMD Catalyst and Open Source (radeon) drivers.
To start, AMD has been publishing the specs so that the devs don't need to do (so much) reverse engineerings which has lead the AMD Open Source (radeon) driver to be very high quality and work really well with the chip sets. The AMD chipsets therefore are also better supported over the long term as a result.

OTOH, nVidia isn't doing that yet, so the Open Source (nouveau) driver is nearly all what the devs have figured out through reverse engineering; where as the proprietary driver is an OS-independent binary-blob with OS-specific wrappers for integrating into Linux/Windows. If your nVidia chip set is still supported by nVidia, then chances are that the nVidia proprietary driver will work better; it will certainly use more functionality of your card but you may end up with more crashes as it won't be as natively integrated to the Linux Kernel and eco-system (nVidia replaces several parts of the graphics stack as part of their integration last I knew) as the Open Source  Driver. The nouveau open source driver is pretty good, but doesn't support every feature of every card since it's primarily reverse engineering so they may not know how to take advantage of stuff; or it may be that that functionality is not fully stable yet; the advantage is that you'll have better integration with the Linux Kernel and eco-system.
$0.02
Ben

  
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