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At Present Which is the best choice for a Ubuntu graphics card, AMD or nVidia?

I have an ATI HD 5870 card. Drivers in 12.04 are so slow, they are pointless. In fact I have tried all sorts of configuration and have fallen back to Ubuntu 2D which is usable but not that quick. Chrome canvas performance in Windows 7 trounces that of Ubuntu which is quite shocking as I paid quite a lot of money for the card a couple of years ago and I thought the drivers would be there by now.

So, I'm thinking about upgrading to an Nvidia GTX680 card but before I shell out £500 I wanted to know whether it works well in Ubuntu 12.04.

I have been reading that ATI are being kinder to the Linux desktop than Nvidia at the moment. How can this be?

EDIT: I specifically would like to hear from people who moved from ATI to Nvidia for similar reasons and about their experience. Thank you.

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thomas-peter
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  • Please edit your question to state what you mean by "drivers in Ubuntu". Have you installed AMD/ATI's drivers, or are you using the open ones that are built in? – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Jul 14 '12 at 15:08
  • Hi Jo, just to make myself clear, this isn't a question about how to get a driver working. It's broader than that. If you are interested, I have tried just about every propriety and non-propriety release out there and and not just on Ubuntu eiether. Having a card that just works is a big part of my requirement. – thomas-peter Jul 14 '12 at 15:16
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    Out of curiosity, is there an open site that is an example of of pointlessly slow? I'm not very demanding in my needs, except overall performance needs to be quick and things like Gimp/Inkscape/etc needs to work well. But with my low-power AMD card (Radeon HD 5450), I've never had any problems with speed, so I'm wondering if you have a problem or your needs are just much greater than mine (or I'm blissfully unaware of the limitations). – Marty Fried Jul 14 '12 at 15:27
  • No website that I can think of but if you wish I can elaborate further. When I said pointlessly I did not mean it does not have a point. I meant pointlessly as in meaningless, unproductive, futile, ineffectual. By slow, I meant really, really slow. I have an I7 machine with striped SSDs on a dedicated controller. With the proprietary drivers installed (and I mean every proprietary driver from ATI since the card was available, and testing in Mint, Centos, Redhat, even in other machines) the system crawls along. – thomas-peter Jul 14 '12 at 15:37
  • Well, performance is hard to quantify, but maybe there's something about that AMD model. Have you tried updating the BIOS for the GPU or even the computer itself? I use an old Asus/AMD Athlon 4400+ dual core motherboard with the inexpensive 5450, and it doesn't seem slow even with the standard open driver. – Marty Fried Jul 14 '12 at 16:16
  • If Nvidia are the same as ATI, it looks like I will have to go back to Windows for development. A sad day :( – thomas-peter Jul 14 '12 at 18:21

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