how are AMD video cards with wine these days?

[ZombieRedShirt]

Hello people. I'm considering buying a new video card, and my choices are down to an nvidia 560 gtx or some simliarly priced amd video card. I fully realize that the nvidia card is much more likely to play nice with linux in general, I just hoped for some kind of confirmation or a pleasant surprise. Would anyone care to share recent experiences?
(Also, I'm not sure just how much support there is for the nvidia 660 card at the moment under linux, does anyone know anything worth mentioning on this?)

Thanks.

[Freeze_XJ]

I'm running an AMD card for years now, and since AMD actively began to update drivers (end 2010 I think) the quality improved considerably. Right now there are only a few minor issues (voltages that cannot be adapted, some sensors that are not found, etc), but the major stuff works just fine. I know nothing about NVidias any more, they used to be OK as well. It's a wash these days I'd say.

[vitamin]

Just one "small" grain of salt on that report - ATI's drivers just (this week) got full OpenGL certification on Linux. This means they were not standard copmlient before....

So all the claims "it worked for me" come from people who didn't actually use anything more then features required for glxgears.

@ Freeze_XJ List what all games/graphics programs "works fine" for you?

[doh123]

AMD drivers on OSX still suck with Wine...

[DanKegel]

Wine's Direct3D maintainer says AMD drivers aren't bad anymore (at least on Linux,
dunno what he thinks about Mac OS X)..

I haven't tried them myself.

[ZombieRedShirt]

Thanks for the input, I might stick with nvidia...In that case, anyone got info on the 660 gt? Is it fully supported yet?

[Freeze_XJ]

Just one "small" grain of salt on that report - ATI's drivers just (this week) got full OpenGL certification on Linux. This means they were not standard copmlient before....

So all the claims "it worked for me" come from people who didn't actually use anything more then features required for glxgears.

@ Freeze_XJ List what all games/graphics programs "works fine" for you?

I'd rather not produce an extensive list, but it includes Guild Wars (1 and 2), Mass Effect, Terraria (although installing that one was a PITA), FlightGear (linux-native), and the common programs like Google Earth. I also tend to write my own simple programs with OpenGL (molecular modelling, with just a crude framework to make things visible) and so far I haven't run into specific errors that I can attribute to my graphics card or drivers. (note that games may not run perfectly well, but those errors are to blame on the Windows-to-wine-issues, and not on the graphics card as far as I could find)

Note that certification is just that, getting a certificate. Maybe they either didn't care about it, or the whole traject took ages (and has/had to be repeated for every new version of the drivers, which means that they'd have to jump hoops and pay every single month), or maybe they indeed didn't fulfill all requirements. I have no idea, but most games that run well under Wine aren't officially supported either

[richard1558]

I also have an AMD card, ATI Mobility Radeon 5470.

From my experience, fglrx+wine is a pain, radeon(OSS Driver)+wine makes a lot of games work.

Games I have played recenty: Age of Empires 3 + Expansions, Mount and Blade + mods, Minecraft(was curious), Stronghold Crusader, Civilization 3, TES III Morrowind GOTY, Counter strike 1.6, Anno 1602, Battlefield 2(minor terrain glitch, a bit too bright).

All games' graphical performance was excellent, with TES III Morrowind GOTY being an exception, where it runs with 25-30fps, which is still playable.

[ZombieRedShirt]

Thanks for all the responses. I'm actually more interested in desktop video cards, the higher end models that require the fglrx drivers.

[landeel]

I have a notebook with AMD E-350 APU, and a desktop with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 550, and my advice is get a NVIDIA.

The performance loss between Windows and wine is much bigger with AMD.

Also, AMD cards seem to be optimized for DirectX, the OpenGL performance is poor even on Windows.