tim_s, on 17 February 2013 - 15:03, said:
It was my understanding that nVidia already has official drivers on Linux. It is why I have always used nVidia for my Linux machines.
NVIDIA only has a proprietary driver (which runs on i386 and AMD64). AMD has had a proprietary for about as long NVIDIA, but it performs much more poorly and is updated infrequently. However, the (existing - before this announcement) open-source drivers are exactly the opposite. The open-source
radeon driver performs very well (although not quite as well as the proprietary driver in Windows), and the open-source
nouveau driver could stand some improvement. Both of the open-source drivers are VERY stable - much more so than their proprietary counterparts - but they are slower to support new hardware and features. I don't use proprietary graphics drivers anymore - not because of dogma - because I value the extreme stability more than a little extra speed.
This announcement is very exciting! Although I already primarily use AMD graphics cards because the reverse-engineered
radeon driver performs much better than
nouveau, I'm hopeful that now we will be able to get performance to rival that of the same card in Windows. If that's the case, I will definitely buy a 8000 series card when they are released.