Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
One thing you need to look out for right now is hybrid cards. These are integrated graphics cards in combination with discrete graphics cards. The issue is that there is little support and no full functionality when switching between cards. There's a program out there for the NVidia Optimus called bumblebee which still isn't up to par since you have to manually run an application and tell it to use the discrete card.
Hi @kobaltz, my motherboard doesn't support any of these technologies and I don't have an integrated graphics card either. I agree though that you need to take it into account when buying a new motherboard as well.
Nvidia's drivers are better than any open source driver, including ATI. ATI's closed driver is no match to NVidia; aside from performance and stability issues, ATI is always outdated with respect to latest Linux kernel and X.org version support (NVidia is always up do date). And Nvidia is the only one that keeps up with the latest OpenGL standard, and comes with good video acceleration (VDPAU).
Would like to agree with Ambroz. nVidia's drivers, albeit closed, are always up to date and as far as I've seen very stable. I cannot speak to the performance difference, however concerning comparisons of Windows nVidia vs ATI drivers the distinctions are quite clear. One would only hope most of this performance carries over into Linux. Assuming you are running a popular x86/x86_64 architecture.
With Linux stick with ATI, hands down! With windows; Nvidia. This is based on much
practicle experience. It all depends on how and what you compute. Generally theres your
answer. Im a programmer so I have an idea of which direction is up., cheers!