Recent works on MIMO receiver design were mainly focused on sphere decoding, which provides a trade-off between the performance and complexity by suitably choosing the “radius” or the number of candidates in the search space. Meanwhile, another approach, called poly-diagonalization and trellis detection, has been proposed to compromise the complexity and performance. In this paper, we compare various MIMO receiver algorithms in terms of both performance and complexity. The performance is evaluated in a frequency selective fading channel environment on the basis of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with channel coding, for which the generation of soft decision values is crucial. The simulations show that the poly-diagonalization approach matches the performance of sphere decoding at similar computational complexity.