I am going to buy a new graphics card and can’t choose between Nvidia and AMD. I know that Nvidia has bad reputation in Linux community but how really it works? And I heard recently their drivers got better. What can you recommend?
P. S. I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)
If you want Nvidia Reflex,DLSS and RTX and GSYNC,etc and your fine with installing out of tree proprietary drivers and fine with some minor issues(Like rarely breaking randomly) Nvidia If you don’t care about Nvidias features AMD.
In my experience older nvidia cards (~5 years old +) work fine, newer ones are very hit-or-miss
Amd cards of any age work pretty much perfectly as far as I can tellThough if the drivers not being proprietary is a hard line for you then amd is your only option really
The nouveau drivers are just barely enough to have a desktop, anything actually needing a GPU will perform very poorly (in my anecdotal experience with 4K). Or, to put it another way, choosing an NVIDIA card is choosing their proprietary drivers.
So you’re left with AMD (and Intel). The open amdgpu driver is pretty good and is suitable for gaming. Which I do.
I have no experience with Intel, but I believe their open drivers are pretty good.
So I recommend AMD.
I have an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.
My two cents.
I have quite a few Nvidia GPUs I still use (2080,3080ti,3090) but recently purchased two AMD cards. I have a 5700xt and 7800xt.
I recently started using Universal Blue Linux as my daily driver on most of my systems. Bluefin for my desktop with Nvidia, Bazzite for my gaming PC with AMD.
They do both work however I have still had more issues with NVIDIA than AMD. For example, running games tends to be buggier but that is specifically an Nvidia driver issue. I’m guessing most hot fixes come out for the windows driver first. For instance, FF7 Rebirth does not render world geometry on Nvidia on Linux. I do not have this problem under AMD
I started purchasing the AMD cards because I was growing tired of waiting for Nvidia stability on Linux.
Is it much better than it was before , yes Do you use Nvidia CUDA apps or AI? Check, that works! Is it still as smooth and seamless as AMD, nope, you’re still going to end up with regressions.
I think it’s only a matter time before Nvidia finally figured this out as they heavily rely on Linux as a platform in their own work. But right now your best user experience overall is going to be on AMD hardware.
If you’re unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel if yout friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.
I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)
In that case AMD, no doubt about it.
If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.
If you’re on Linux AMD is clearly superior because NVidia has Linux performance issue compared to Windows so you’re ending up paying more for less. However NVidia has the monopole for a reason their product are superior but at what price ? Also if you want to avoid proprietary drivers AMD gets the win too.
I do think AMD is the better option for anyone that spend less than 800-1’000$ on a GPU even for Windows gamers. Personnaly I have made the switch from NVidia to AMD 2 years after ditching Windows for Linux, Never looked back even though Cyberpunk2077 looks amazing on NVidia RTX and some other things.
I have upgraded last year to a RX 7800 XT and have no regrets on spending that money.
When was the last time you used an Nvidia card under Linux? There are no performance issues compared to windows, haven’t been any in YEARS.
When playing the exact same games on the exact same machine with NVidia GPU you can get 8-20% better performance on Windows compared to Linux. On the AMD side you can get up to 5% boost on Linux, that’s just the reality. Though you could also loose 5% performance compared to Windows in some games.
And to answer your question it should have been around 2022.
Where are you getting these numbers? I have a 3080, used a 1080Ti before, and though my last direct comparison was a while (like a few years) ago, I had more like 3-5% difference in FPS in the games I tested, at most 10% in RS2 Vietnam, but this ultimately turned out to be a CPU bottleneck. I would assume (and, reading reviews on reddit, this seems confirmed) that the drivers have mostly gotten better since then.
Well it’s from my experience during lockdown when I started to dualboot Linux and Windows with an NVidia GPU and some benchmarks I’ve seen on YouTube recently.
How a CPU bottleneck could happen on an OS and not on another ?
Oh it happens on Windows too, but wine adds some overhead, so you have less headroom on Linux. Same goes for DXVK / VKD3D - they add some CPU overhead.
I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.
100% AMD, for sure. AMD won’t make much problems and works ootb.
Nvidia on the other hand… if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won’t work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won’t cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won’t give you the performance you paid for?Also, Nvidia clearly doesn’t care about PCs or its’ users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?
I had a better desktop experience with the FOSS driver than the proprietary driver when testing a 2060 on Fedora 41.
FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.
Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.
AMD cards work great with the open source driver. As i understand it, the nouveau driver is getting better but might not be there yet? So if the non-proprietary driver is a must you might be better off with AMD.
Could be game specific, but there is no ground rendering in final fantasy. https://youtu.be/DxE-4ZxYxDA
A workaround’s been developed for the issue regarding FFVII.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8408#issuecomment-2657340142
I don’t want any proprietary drivers
So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.
there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver
I mean, there is. It just isn’t recommended for most users.
didn’t know this. is it no good then? does it have the HDMI 2.1 driver missing from the open source driver?
It’s the pro driver for workstation use. If you are gaming then you don’t need it. The gaming driver is only open source
the driver is called AMDGPU PRO. it sits on top of the normal driver, and contains stuff specific to high performance compute and workstation workloads. i think it’s a requirement for properly fast ROCm but i’m not sure.
Only the kernel bindings are open source. The actual driver is still closed source. So that only leaves you with AMD and Intel.