so my old GPU died a few days ago and I was thinking which brand of GPU to get next. AMD or Nvidia? I’ve heard Nvidia drivers are very annoying with Linux but I’ve never had an AMD GPU before. Which would be better? I’ll sometimee switch to Windows to play specific games as well.
AMD all the way. Few weeks ago I finally made a switch from Nvida for the first time. I have no problems in gaming. All games that I play run same as on windows.
a question i have: I use pop!_OS and I installed it using the Nvidia ISO, will there be a problem if I switch to an AMD GPU?
I don’t think there will be any issues. On that note, use open source AMD drivers. You dont need proprietary one from their site.
No. That ISO just installs the drivers by default. You can just uninstall them. Or leave them. They won’t break anything, although they will slow down your updates because they are huge.
I’ve decided to buy AMD but which one do I buy? I found a few used RX 6600 and RX 5700. Some of them have XT after them, and I don’t know what that means.
That all depends on what games you play. Do you want to play new AAA games or retro? Indie? What is your budget? XT is stronger version of regular 6600.
I guess spider-man miles morales would be the newest game I would play. I usually play older games.
For spider man recommended gpu is RX 580. I would suggest you, of course if you can afford, to go for RX 7700 xt or 7800 xt. You will be more future proof.
isn’t the RX 580 significantly worse than RX 6600?
I’ll probably go for 6600, I found one for very cheap
Just chipping in to say I have a 3060 and I’m scared of every update breaking my drivers again - just don’t get a Nvidia, don’t do it to yourself
I have a 3080 ti and haven’t had any issues yet, worst that happens is I would just load the previous driver from the cache in recovery mode. That said, I want to get back to amd, I just don’t have the money for it
I’m not. Nvidia dkms hasn’t failed me yet. I’m using Garuda Linux.
Short answer: AMD
Long answer: AMD used to be very bad, NVIDIA has always been the same, i.e. if you’re willing to use proprietary drivers it works, but it has some hiccups. A while back AMD open source their drivers so the game turned around, nowadays they’re very easy and compatible from what I’ve heard. I’ve used NVIDIA for over a decade, but my next card Winn be AMD for sure.
PS: if you’re still in doubt, the latest Linux kernel purposefully broke the NVIDIA proprietary driver because NVIDIA has been copyright infringing the Linux kernel by using functions that are considered so integral to the kernel that if you have to use them you work should be considered derivative and be bounded by GPL licence.
A while back AMD open source their drivers
No, they abandoned their proprietary driver and joined development of existing mesa driver. Basically as if Nvidia joined nouveau.
if you’re willing to use proprietary drivers it works, but it has some hiccups.
Pre-Pascal GPUs aren’t supported by closed source driver, so your only option there is nouveau.
He’s asking to buy a new one, so old cards not working is not really an issue. But are you sure about the Turing line (i.e. 20 series)? I thought the Maxwell (i.e. 7 series) was the oldest you can use on the proprietary drivers. In fact up until recently I had a 1080 that I used with the proprietary drivers.
Oops. Pre-Pascal? The one after Maxwell.
Also Maxwell AFAIK only 750, 700-780 except 750 are Kepler.
if you’re willing to use proprietary drivers it works, but it has some hiccups
Do you know if nvidia still has issues with Wayland or are nvidia and MAD on par nowadays in that area?
The only way nVidia works well with Wayland is with nouveau
Their proprietary drivers still don’t work. They announced plans to make them work better, but they haven’t put in the work to merge them yet
Sounds like currently AMD is a safer bet if one was in the market for a new card.
Thanks for your answer.
Last I tried it didn’t worked, however last I told Reddit/Lemmy that NVIDIA didn’t worked on Wayland I was downvoted to hell and told it obviously worked and had worked for a long time. So in theory it works, but I was never able to get it to work and I have given up trying until I get an AMD card.
To add to the AMD part, RDNA3 drivers were actually quite bad at launch, I think they were mostly fixed only by April-May 2023. Now they work great. Also, if you’re interested in AI, stick with Nvidia. You can run most stuff on AMD cards, but it’s always an issue (The main one I’m having is that a lot of stuff depends on torch 2.0, while there’s only 2.1 for ROCm 5.5+)
Definitely AMD. The drivers are actually open source, much better with less bugs and there are no problems known to me. I currently have had a GTX 1070 for the last 5 years, until I’ve enough money for an AMD card. My setups, especially Wayland based, are riddled with bugs not present on my (Intel based) laptop - which means the only explanation is the NVidia card. The (admittedly: testing on Arch) drivers have broken two times in a year, not making the system unusable but definitely preventing gaming.
On top of that, the 4090 may be 25% better than the 7900 XTX - but it’s also 50+% more expensive than the 7900 XTX, which is a pattern which can be seen for every generation and version of GPUs by Nvidia/AMD. Nvidia’s equivalents to AMD’s cards are generally 25-50% more expensive, with worse performance but better Raytracing and of course DLSS support - oh wait, DLSS 1 and 2 are only for RTX 20 and up, while DLSS 4 is only for 40 Series GPUs. Which means no matter how good it looks, FSR will be the only alternative for almost all players, even those using NVidia cards like me.Something different: Intel’s Arc GPUs would maybe be worth a shot. According to a PC World article, the A770 beats the 3060 even in it’s own habitat - Raytracing. It’s cheap and gets better with every driver update. It also seems like the Arc GPUs are compatible with Linux fine, though I’d suggest you look up the compatibility with the games you want to play.
I have a 1070 Ti, but I’m on Ubuntu and I haven’t had any issues at all for ~5 years. IMO the issue then is Arch, and how the drivers are handled. I also have only updated the driver once (450-server to 525-server), when Satisfactory switched to unreal engine 5.
I would still recommend AMD though, and I also plan on switching when I have the money for it.
I have a 1060 on Arch and had no problems whatsoever. It will get ugly once the 1060 is no longer supported by the mainline driver, though.
Yup. It’s getting to be fairly old GPU, I’m feeling anxious about getting a new one because I’m poor af but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AMD, easily. Its literally plug and play. You can even pick some second hand options for cheap that are still solid for gaming such as the vega 56/64 and the RX 5700XT (which is I use). Intel isn’t bad so long as you’re not playing the newest stuff, my Arc a750 is solid in games like Fallout 4 and Elden Ring. Starfield is complete mess on it. Another thing with Intel is you’ll need a distro with a 6+ kernel to get the most out of it.
AMD is better on Linux most of the time. Running a AMD card day one is not hassle free.
That being said if you pick a up to date distro all 7000 and 6000 series should work fine now. They are already in the kernel and mesa for a while. You may want to update you kernel and mesa sometimes to get better performance and stability.
But in my experience nvidia is fine on Linux. (I only used older cards gtx 970 and a rtx 2060) especially when you have just one monitor or all monitors on the same refresh rate. It’s not on par with windows but will work with the Nvidia drivers.
So I would say if you a simple setup Nvidia is fine and AMD is better. It all depends on the best deal you can get. If ray tracing is not that important AMD is new the best value. If you more on a budget second AMD Rx 5700 XT are pretty cheap here and there are some good deals on Nvidia 30 series cards.
As far I have read intel cards can be a pain on Linux. So I would not recommend it for now.
well…
“Better” is relative to your own use case. If you’re a casual user, who maybe play some games on Linux, and don’t really care about getting those games to work with Nvidia’s version of ray tracing upscaling stuff, getting an AMD card is no brainer because it’s cheaper and works out of the box too, and many games are starting to support ray tracing and upscaling on AMD card as well.
But, if you absolutely need to have access to CUDA, RTX and DLSS, then you’ll have to get an Nvidia card and deal with consequences of using their drivers (buggy on Wayland, etc).
This sums up my feelings on Nvidia.
This better be angry Torvalds
Edit: It was
It’s a very heartfelt, genuine, and relatable moment.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/i2lhwb_OckQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I am on AMD, as I had too many problems with Nvidia over the years (e.g. driver borked after upgrade and stuck on console). That said, AMD driver ain’t of great quality these days either. Playing around with StableDiffusion and running out of VRAM will crash the driver and require a reboot. Some Xorg/kernel/driver versions crash frequently. One of my monitors does not work when connected over HDMI in Linux (flickering image), but works fine in Windows.
AMD is also quite a bit more challenging with AI stuff in general, as everything is using Nvidia’s CUDA. The situation is however improving. On the positive side, AMD cards have more VRAM than equally priced Nvidia cards, which is far more important than raw performance in AI workloads (not having VRAM means you just can’t do some things).
So not exactly smooth sailing, but AMD mostly works ok. For plain gaming via Proton I didn’t have any issues.
How does it work for ML and AI tasks with AMD and their ROCm? I really despise Nvidia as a company but unfortunately when it comes to AI/ML and other productivity tasks AMD is just much inferior to Nvidia’s offering. Otherwise I would have definitely been very interested in the AMD 7900XTX, that has everything for pretty much half the price of 4090.
Install the ROCm version of packages and it mostly works (at least on Arch, and I assume Ubuntu since it has official packages from AMD.)
I am also using arch anyway, even though I am thinking of switching to Void now. I am just a bit worried about the “mostly” part. I was toying with the idea of getting 4060Ri with 16Gb of RAM, because of the VRAM. The other two cards are 4080 and 4090 I was considering but both are overpriced, especially the 4080.
I was running a LLM earlier this evening and my 3090 started to make a ticking noise everytime a token was generated. Panicing, I look for the first time in years at AMD’s lineup. A 7900 XTX goes for $1400 CDN, but a 4090 is almost $2500.
I also use Daz Studio/Iray to render characters before feeding them to Stable Diffusion, because it’s a lot easier to get exactly what you want without spending hours tweaking prompts and seeds and hoping for the best.
An extra grand isn’t really that bad when you factor in the lifetime of the card.
If it’s a ZOTAC card it might just click when the fans start and stop. My ZOTAC 3060 makes a click when the fans start and stop. It’s a good way to know when my PC wakes itself up lol
Naw this was a click everytime a token was generated, and they were generating really slowly so I knew something was wrong. I think it was bouncing off the 24GB memory limit and something was being tripped, so I changed the loader from AutoGPQ to ExLlama_HF and everything works fine now.
AMD is generally better
If I were buying a card right now I’d get either the 6700XT or the 6800XT because they’re both at crazy good value for the money right now, especially if you can get one used or refurbished from a reputable seller with a return policy.
@entropicdrift @Yoru love my 6700XT, it’s been a great card so far. Runs fantastic on Linux too.
I have never had issues with AMD for my graphics cards, been running team red with Linux for almost a decade now. Even switching distros no issues. But, I don’t buy new hardware, I always grab last gen, so bugs are usually worked out by the time I get my hands on it.
AMD. I’d get the rx 6800 xt
I’m mostly a newbie to Linux, I’ve been using it as a main gaming rig for several months and only Nobara. I hear often that AMD is hassle free, but I’m using Nvidia and honestly I’ve had no roadblocks. I started with a 2080ti and have since moved to a 4080, no hassles. There is a built in updater and it automatically downloads the newest driver packages. They are always a version or so behind the latest Windows set but meh. Switching on gSync was as simple as toggling VRR for my 144hz monitor.
The one thing that I needed to look up was getting ray tracing running. There was additional stuff I needed to add in Steam (copy paste from the post I found), and then RTX was up and running.
Like I say, I definitely don’t know better than the people saying AMD is a smart choice, but I don’t think people necessarily need to worry that their Nvidia system is a roadblock to switching to Linux.
AMD used to be a hassle, but now the Mesa support is very good. It’s probably better than Nvidia.
I assume you’re not using Wayland at the moment?
Wayland is hot garbage to begin with.
I am, yes. Are you referring to the disappearing mouse cursor thing, because that’s really annoying, but I hadn’t seen any mention of it being linked to Nvidia. It seemed more Proton related. I tried several fixes I found and none worked. There was a few suggestions to switch to XOrg (?) But when I tried that I was locked at 60fps and couldn’t use VRR.
Anyways, I’d say that’s been my most frustrating issue.
Thanks for this. I just shot a 3060ti since the 6700xt was similar in all things but ray tracing and dlss (I tried to go team red but I ultimately couldn’t). The comments made me very anxious that it wouldn’t work on linux.
