AMD 780G or Nvidia Geforce 8200 ?

I'm thinking of building a HTPC with Linux and XBMC

Which one you guys reckon is the go
AMD 780G chipset or Geforce 8200 chipset?

I know nvidia has better linux driver support but I heard amd is making progress with their Linux drivers as well.

I want to go down the 780G path and want to see if anyone has any opinion regarding either the 2 chipsets and current Linux support.

I am building a HTPC with the 780G chipset as well, but until the components are here it will probably be another 2 or 3 weeks. From what I have heard, the current fglrx drivers are shaping up to be pretty usable, and the opensource drivers are getting better and better as well. Most of the stuff seems to work already, albeit I don't think you will get the hardware acceleration of HD content, one of the features that really makes the chipset standout. Since amd/ati is really doing something for the opensource community though, I am hoping we will see full support for that in the near future.

I have not used either chipset that you mention, but I have had better experiences with nvidia drivers than ati.

Hopefully ati will improve, but I am not willing to be a beta tester in this area!

Hm, after some digging on phoronix.com it seems HD acceleration might even be working already, this will need some testing in 2 weeks. If you can wait that long, I definately promise to post my results.

you mind giving a link to the place you found that?

Well, I unfortunately don't have a link to a direct statement, I was just gathering clues around the forums:

The official ati proprietary linux driver page states the following:

Q1: What features are provided by the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver?
A1:
The ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently provides hardware acceleration for 3D graphics and video playback. It also includes support for dual displays and TV Output.

Then there are several reports of people who have stated they have the drivers fully working, and a statement of an AMD guy, saying that textured video should be supported with the proprietary drivers:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost....ostcount=9

In the end, I have already ordered the hardware anyhow, so let's see what comes of it

No graphics manufacturer today provides hardware acceleration of H.264 under Linux, most only support MPEG-2 under Linux via XvMC.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Hardware_Acc...o_Decoding

...and as you can read XBMC offers no hardware accelerated video decoding today

Ah, that's too bad. Thanks for the clarification gamester.

AMD/ATI have made some great headway in terms of linux support, but imo they haven't caught up nVidia. So for right now I'd say nVidia, but who knows what the next couple months will bring.

So, I'm a bit confused about offloading and hardware support for things like h.264/VC1.

If it's supported in the drivers, on Linux, Windows, or MacOS, does XBMC have to do anything in code to make it offload, or does the driver automatically handle this?

ie. If AMD/ATI or Nvidia finally creates a decent proprietary or open source driver that takes advantage of UVD or PureVideo HD do we have the support?

Or will it still take a whole lot of coding to implement it?

-Wes