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)
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.