On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Peter Humphrey <pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote: > > Not just the computing power, though: Gentoo support will be important over > the life of the system. If the life of this current box is any guide, that > could stretch to 10 years. Well, maybe. >
So, I can't speak to computation in particular, so take all of this with a grain of salt. In general the sentiment I've seen expressed is that at least presently the quality of drivers goes (best to worst): NVidia proprietary AMD open source NVidia open source So, right now if you want the best overall performance/etc and don't care about tainted kernels nvidia is your best choice, and I believe it isn't even close. However, if you want the best overall performance WITH AN OPEN SOURCE kernel/etc, then AMD is the better solution. Now, as I understand it AMD has been talking about moving more towards open source drivers so that they're much closer in quality to NVidia's. At that point there will be less need to compromise between driver quality and open source. Of course, either vendor's hardware might be superior. (From what I've heard at the high end NVidia tends to be better, and of course stuff like games tends to support it more, but at the lower end AMD is VERY competitive and doesn't tend to cripple stuff as much to segment the markets - something that is true of their CPUs as well.) So, while NVidia is often the route people go, I'd say that you need to understand your needs. With AMD it is all open source and I think most of it is even upstreamed into the kernel, so support is as good as it gets. With Nvidia you may find yourself limited to particular kernels, especially once your card is no longer supported. AMD overall has more commitment to open source itself, though it doesn't port its proprietary windows drivers over like NVidia does. Again, all of this is more general and pertains to graphics, and the situation for computation could be very different. I also am hardly a graphics card super-enthusiast, so if others have more knowledge I'm all ears. -- Rich
