Nvidia vs. ATI for Linux

I've been reading up on ATI versus
Nvidia for Linux. Here's the first
article I read:

ATI vs. NVIDIA on Linux - the showdown

The article was written April 16, 2009. Therefore,
it is about 2-1/2 years old as of this writing.

As of the writing of this article, it seems
that Nvidia offers slightly better support
for Linux. However, ATI seems to be closing
the gap. That's the impression I get.

Here's an article that suggests that Nvidia
is still supporting Linux:

NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA Driver

A cursory scan of the above article might convince
you that Nvidia is dropping Linux altogether.
That, it seems, is far from the case. What Nvidia
is really doing is what they've always done which
is support their proprietary graphics card in
a proprietary way.

I, myself, don't mind that. I just want the graphics
card to work. However, I also understand that open
source if very very important to the Linux community
for very good reasons.

Here's a blog post that seems to be suggesting that
ATI is a better card to get if yo care about open
sourcer:

NVidia vs ATI: open source driver question

ATI seems to have a leg up on Nvidia if open source is
your priority. Here's an article that seems to suggest
that ATI has made much progress in the development of
its open source driver in the past 4 years:

A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

There's a user named lienmeat who posts on the
above thread who seems to be saying that, in general,
binary drivers (translattion: proprietary drivers) are
much better than their open source counterparts.

This thread seems to suggest that Nvidia provides a
better binary driver (a blob, as they call it) then
ATI. Note that this thread is for FreeBSD. However,
I suspect that it applies to Linux as well:

NVidia or ATI?

This thread seems to concur with a lot of what I've
been reading: If your priority is open source,
you will go with an ATI graphics card. If your
priority is raw performance, Nvidia closed source
(binary blob) drivers are best:

Nvidia vs. ATI/AMD in Linux


Ed Abbott