Most videocards come with a driver disc or warning on the box to get latest drivers from a website. Now for NVIDIA that isn't so bad as they have Linux drivers out there for you to easily see and they ARE the latest, provided the user doesn't get blackscreen upon install (very common), and is able to figure out howto install them from bash (annoying for new users).

AMD's website will cause you to find the OLD fglrx drivers for Linux which will give you a rather frustrating experience to say the least.

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They don't need to, the distro comes with them.

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You assume they should know about PPA usage at the start, when its not mentioned anywhere upon installing most Ubuntu distro's. PPA could mean anything.

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Most people don't know to do that, which is why Linux gets such a bad rep, they come, try it out and notice its terrible and leave even thought the distro is rolling OLD broken mesa among other things in the repository. At least for AMD users, if NVIDIA users can get past the black screen and full composition issue then their fine.

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SteamOS is still running kernel 4.1? that is bad!

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Surprised they even bother having FGLRX.. I thought they moved onto the amdgpu-pro ages ago? Also isn't MESA a better option now minus vulkan that is?

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Back when I had my 390x, most Feral games didn't work well or work at all with MESA. Good to see they are noticing the benefits of having a open-source driver.

I'd be surprised if DXMD doesn't get Vulkan at some stage, the game REALLY needs it and I think it would solve issues for Windows also. We need more vulkan supported games to get some momentum...

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The nouveau drivers are making progress and once NVIDIA is pushed into releasing the appropriate firmware files then it will likely perform extremely competitively VS MESA once that happens, this can be shown in the 500 or 600 series results with the driver as those have the full firmware files to allow reclocking et al.

My guess is NVIDIA are just waiting until AMD and MESA starts to overtake their drivers, atm I don't think they believe it will happen so thus aren't in any rush to compete. However with valve now also working on AMD drivers (since their open anyone can help) I think NVIDIA might be in for a surprise sometime around end of year.

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Most gamers on Linux are using NVIDIA cards, I can't remember the exact percentage but its pretty high. So saying open-source drivers are the most important thing for Linux gamer is kinda misleading given that fact.

Basically its the most important thing for YOU, but the rest of the world just wants a good gaming experience under linux and could give a crap about open/closed drivers.

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I have had some issues under Ubuntu installing NVIDIA drivers resulting in bootup blackscreen, but I rock a functional distro now called manjaro and its NVIDIA drivers work fine without a hitch. Also the screen tearing doesn't appear to happen with FULL COMPOSITION turned on in the nvidia-settings, however I suspect it could impact FPS?!

And YES I do believe AMD open drivers will eventually become a big win for Linux and even surpass NVIDIA in areas, but until that happens the majority of people will not care. We still have some rather terrible performance with RADV atm which NEEDS to be fixed asap...

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