VMD-L Mailing List

From: Bennion, Brian (Bennion1_at_llnl.gov)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2013 - 12:50:36 CST

Hello

I have a mix of nvidia and amd cards on workstations and laptops running fedora core 17/18/19 with "proprietary" drivers

Both drivers of late have tended to be out of sync with the new kernel releases. At work, I block all kernel updates to mitigate this problem (until my IT folks threaten to cut me off). At home, y children have even learned how to boot into commandline mode to run yum to get the nvidia drivers to update after a new kernel was installed.

I have never had to modify source with nvidia drivers. However, it was almost routine to have to google some error in the amd drivers and apply a patch. Having said that, I have not needed to make manual patches to kernel/driver sources for AMD cards in 6 or 7 months.

This doesn't mean that they are not buggy still. My windows manager on my fedora 18 laptop gets restarted every time I try to run a remote vmd session.

Nvidia has just worked for all of my viz needs, granted they are not that great.

Regards
Brian

________________________________________
From: owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] on behalf of Jérôme Hénin [jerome.henin_at_ibpc.fr]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 9:31 AM
To: vmd
Subject: vmd-l: AMD vs. nvidia support

Hi everyone,

Traditionally I used to favor nvidia GPUs over AMD for running VMD under Linux, because the drivers were "better" (that is, they ran with some glitches, but ran nonetheless). The landscape seems to be evolving these days, and nvidia has notoriously antagonized the Linus crowd (or was that Linux?) for its lack of cooperation, while AMD has been more forthcoming. That was mostly a problem with open source support, but I wonder if that also reflects in the quality of the proprietary drivers.

So, it would be great to hear about the recent experiences of some VMD/Linux users with AMD and nvidia support - both in terms of features and performance.

Thanks,
Jerome