You don't need to lecture me about open source
i know what it is, both it's qualities and it's flaws.
I agree that the qualities outweigh the flaws. But the thing is that these open source drivers tend to be dirt in comparison to the proprietary ones. I should rather say, "official" ones. And i do recommend Nvidia cards, in all my history as a computer user i have not once been let down or disappointed by an Nvidia GPU, and same goes for intel CPUs, if i have ever been disappointed by hardware (inside the box anyways) it's been AMD, ATI, Western Digital, Mushkin. Apart from these brands i can't think of anything that i've encountered thats particularly bad, but thats probably because i avoid brands if i have any say in the matter, and i have already decided which brands are my favorites for certain hardware (all sound = Creative) (Input = Logitech) (Monitors = Tv brands/Philips)
I tried AMD CPUs and GPUs (together) for like 2 years, i actually regretted changing from i think it was intel E6300 or somethin like that (core 2 duo @ 2.4ghz) for an AMD Phenom II X2 BE or somethin like that (think it was a 3ghz dual core amd processor) it was basically a new generation AMD cpu vs an old generation Intel CPU, i actually felt that the AMD CPU was doing its job slower than the old Intel processor, of course it was just a feeling rather than any real benchmark, but it just felt wrong to use the AMD cpu...
Next with the AMD GPUs, i had 5 cards or so, out of which 3 were just simply faulty and i had to have replaced after finding a reliable way to reproduce the glitches. I've had probably about 10 Nvidia cards and none were faulty. Again though i had a current generation AMD card, and i regretted buying it instead of my 2 gens old Nvidia card. The nvidia card was 8800GTS, i think the AMD card i used was 5770 but i'm not sure, might've been 4770 either way it was a much newer gaming grade card than my 8800 bought i think 2 years later than the 8800. The 8800 is of course a legendary card, it can still run most things.
I also have an AMD laptop now that i bought used. It's one of those APU pieces of dirt, first of all, the processor (again) doesn't feel right, and the graphics performance is terrible and the "dedicated" graphics part of the APU can cause all sorts of problems including lag, and freezing(temporary). Also with this laptop something happened that hasn't happened with any laptop i have ever had. I had to exchange the thermal paste on the processor because the damned thing started overheating like crazy... It couldn't even complete a nice compilation of a program without overheating
after exchanging the paste it's still just worse in my eyes than my intel based thinkpad, that btw has an iGPU. There's this "if" the dedicated graphics on the laptop works, then it has better gaming performance than my thinkpad, otherwise it's worthless to me, i only use it as a communication center (skype, teamspeak, chrome, etc) whereas my thinkpad is my wonderful, reliable school laptop and i can without any fears install Linux as the only OS on that one (but on the AMD laptop i have this constant fear that the drivers wont work with X in some version so i just use windows)
But due to all the faulty AMD GPUs i had, and just how the AMD cpu didn't feel right to me, i had the computer for 2 years and then i sold it never to buy an AMD product ever again. I hate them in a biased kind of way now, i wouldn't trust them to make the processor for my damn laptop
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Due to my experiences with AMD, i am inclined to think that they use cheaper components than intel & nvidia for their products. (Which would explain why they're cheaper) I choose quality over affordability when it comes to my PC.
Probably the biggest reason why i wont buy a PS4 is that it uses AMD hardware, and i just don't trust AMD.
But apart from my hate on AMD and all of its products, then yes Nvidia (from what i've seen, both in experience and benchmarks) in general has better performance than AMD GPUs. This is however subjective so you could call it an opinion. And Nvidia is also working hard to do better on Linux, this is not because Linus torvalds threw them a finger, actually kudos to them to have enough business sense to ignore that, (seriously, he should apologize by now...), the reason they're doing this now is:
SteamBox/SteamOS, i got some info on the steambox earlier this year where valve had experimental nvidia drivers, this leads me to believe that valve which is actively trying to push gaming to linux has made some sort of contract (or similar) with nvidia to convince nvidia to make better linux drivers so that their SteamBox which is probaby meant to ship with an Nvidia GPU will not suck when it's released.
Shield: Shield is android based so they need to get up close and personal with Linux anyways.
This is where the cat is from and yes you should definitely watch that.