Amd vs. nvidia: what propietary driver gives the best Arch experience?

I'm looking into buying a gddr5, < 100€ dedicated video card. I'd like to know, on the pure driver and updates side, which between nvidia and amd gives a smoother experience? I am on x86_64 and have an intel i5 2500k cpu, and probably the choice ATM boils down to sapphire 6670 vs. palit gt 630 (in their gddr5 version).
I'll use the card to play some 3D games (so we're speaking propietary drivers) but I'd like to understand how much time I have to plan on tracking down bugs, downgrading packages and so on... on archlinux specifically.
what are your experiences?

How does the nvidia driver suck? In terms of quality it is on par with the windows version. Driver updates are frequent and feature loaded. Just yesterday they released a new driver with great improvements. Never had any glitches or crashes even with their beta drivers. Video hardware acceleration through VDPAU works like a charm.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n … px=MTI3NjI
Every OpenGL game is just as fast on Linux as on Windows on my machine. What makes them better than AMD is also that they support cards for a very long time. Up untill 304.64 which is just 1-2 months old they supported really really old cards with their driver branch. With >310 everything newer than the 8000 series is supported. On windows I couldn't get any newer driver than what my laptop vendor offered on their website in the "download" section which was some crappy old driver from 2007. Even on the nvidia website I simply couldn't get a driver for my GeForce 6150 Go. No matter if I searched for Product = GeForce or N-Force which is the mainboard that is used in my laptop. Their little java applet couldn't figure out my needed driver either. On linux I only had to "pacman -S nvidia". Done. Works. So their linux driver support is sometimes even better than on windows.
If that is a driver that "sucks". What is a good driver in your opinion?
If you want to find out what really sucks go into the AMD section of the "Steam for Linux" Beta Forum and check out all the glitches and choppy performance these guys have to deal with.
Last edited by blackout23 (2013-01-17 17:29:55)

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Amd vs. nvidia: what propietary driver gives the best Arch experience?

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