It is hard to know what to go with.
nVidia regularly release great working Linux drivers, but they are
proprietary and closed source, I believe. The drivers work well with many 3D
games. nVidia really do not try and support free software as a company, for
some reason, so people say. (Linus recently said that they were the worst
company to work with, for some reason.)
AMD/Radeon release open source GNU/Linux drivers. I believe these drivers
would be free, but there is a small binary blob in them, which AMD/Radeon
need for protection of some sort. AMD seem to be giving support to free
software - they are meant to try and back the Coreboot project, but I haven't
heard of them paying for any development there. Also, afaik, AMD don't
produce mass market motherboards, so their support for Coreboot and a free
BIOS might not matter. Also, this Coreboot support is not the issue I am here
concerned about. From what I have heard, the non-proprietary AMD/Radeon
drivers don't work too well with Linux games, which defeats the whole point
of getting a fast graphics card.
The third choice, there might be others, I don't know, is to forgo a
dedicated graphics card altogether and rely upon the 3D graphics integrated
into the chipset on the motherboard. I don't know how good the latest
integrated graphics are, but they wouldn't be up to playing the latest 3D
games, I think.
What do you think is the way to go here? I would very much like to hear your
opinions and reasoning.
Thank you!
