ATI/AMD or NVIDIA

[Obsidian]

From what I'm reading, they have better support in the Linux community

Actually, Steam for Linux has been the major pushing force behind Nvidia's new Linux drivers, and they are supposedly just as good as the AMD drivers now.

 

Yeah, that and Linus Torvald telling Nvidia to go fuck themselves. No tough love was needed for functional AMD drivers to exist from the start. Though, if I wanted to use dual cards in Crossfire/SLI, I'd probably go for SLI. For some reason, SLI tends to be less troublesome than Crossfire in terms of gaming. Again, from what I've seen on tech forums and such.

[BTGBullseye]

SLI is a better implemented technology, and the hardware is better designed for it.

 

The reason AMD had better drivers to start was because ATI saw that Linux was the future long before AMD bought them, and it was easy to just update the existing Linux drivers.

[Obsidian]

I think that goes without saying haha. Maybe that's why AMD hasn't released a 7990 card themselves, because of difficulties with crossfire. But who knows? PowerColor did it. The fact that PowerColor did it first is embarrassing for AMD and other card manufacturers/distributors. Maybe AMD doesn't see enough of a market for dual GPU cards to justify development costs.

 

Fair enough, AMD's acquisition of ATI is recent enough for that to be the case. Still, they've kept up on the Linux front where Nvidia started slacking until very recently. AMD could've just as easily stopped updating the Linux drivers to save programming costs, but they didn't. They might if they follow a similar development map as their APUs, but as of now there's not much to suggest that's the case.

[BTGBullseye]

You know that updating the programming of a driver in Linux usually only takes about 5-6 man-hours right? So total development costs for the driver is less than $250, and they get tons of positive publicity because of it... The only reason they'd ever stop updating the drivers is if they finally updated the design of their hardware. They're still using the same basic structure as ATI cards from the 90's, and Nvidia has gone through 2 major hardware design upgrades since the GTX 9xxx series. (Fermi and Kepler)

[Obsidian]

I think that $250 estimate may be a little on the high side, but yes, I'm well aware of the little time it takes to update the drivers. Regardless, they still chose to keep up on their driver support for Linux, and that's really all that matters at they end of the day. The fact that Nvidia went through major hardware design upgrades really doesn't matter, since they knew what they were doing and chose to leave Linux support in a sub-par state until very recently. And the fact that the hardware in AMD/ATI cards hasn't seen a major redesign since the 90's and are still able to trade blows with Nvidia in most cases makes AMD's efforts a bit more impressive in my eyes, at least in price/performance ratios. AFAIK, the GTX 690 is still top-dog for single card performers in terms of gaming.