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)
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?
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.
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
Only the kernel bindings are open source. The actual driver is still closed source. So that only leaves you with AMD and Intel.
If you don’t want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.
As for my experience, I’ve had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.
I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I’ve never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.
Anything but Nvidia
If those are your criteria, I would go with AMD right now, because only the proprietary driver will get decent performance out of most nVidia cards. Nouveau is reverse-engineered and can’t tap into a lot of features of newer cards especially, and while I seem to recall there is a new open-source driver in the works, there’s no way it’s mature enough to be an option for anyone but testers.
AMD. Unless you need blender.
I am AMD and use Blender just fine. What do you mean?
Cuda and optix are anecdotally three times faster at rendering than any amd solution.
That doesn’t mean amd doesn’t perform well though, its personal preference on how much that time saving is worth it.
AMD-HIP works just great for me.
“Works great” and “Could work 3x faster” matter to a lot of people.
Well then you’re just nagging about hardware, which isn’t the issue being spouted on here. Blender works with AMD hardware just great, which OP was saying is not the case.
Blender works with AMD hardware just great
No it doesn’t. That’s our point. It works 30% as fast as its competition. That’s not “working just great”…it’s working slowly and like shit. The whole damn point of a GPU is to accelerate that work. The work that your AMD-HIP is doing in blender, could take an hour, and the NVidia would pump it out in 20 minutes.
You’re bitching about hardware capabilities. Read OP’s comment and stop showing up just to comment if you can’t provide anything constructive except whining pedantry.
I have an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.
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.
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.
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
