I have been considering selling my 3060 ti and buying a 6700 xt for a while now. The main reasons are (potentially) switching to wayland, +4 gb of vram, hardware acceleration in firefox (and steam too, it’s leaking vram for me with nvidia), potentially vr on linux with my quest 2 (a lot of things in alvr seem to be locked for nvidia) and better compatibility with linux in general. I don’t really care for productivity or rtx and dlss (it’s not like they work in most games anyway). The upgrade would cost me at most $75.
I’ve been avoiding Nvidia for a while and I generally recommend it (at least for now). I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory though. Nvidia support has come a long way.
That being said, if you can snag a good used amd card to replace your 3060ti then why not if you’re not benefiting from the rtx features and you find your current vram is causing issues, then you do you.
You could also hold out a bit longer and see if the 6800xt becomes more affordable given the recent launch of the mid tier 7000series.
I’ve had my 6700xt for about a year now on Nobara Linux and I absolutely love it.
Plays everything I want at great framerates, never had any driver issues or glitches.
If you’re serious about gaming on linux then yes, the AMD situation is a lot better than nvidia’s, you’ll have better compatibility and better support in general. I would suggest something better than a 6700xt though, you can get good deals on used 6000 series cards and even new ones in some countries.
By the way, Valve finally fixed the leaking VRAM problem.
Absolutely, as a Linux user NVIDIA actually hates you. Give AMD your money.
Support people that support what you. So yes
My last upgrade was from a GTX1070 to a 6700XT. That was both a big performance upgrade, and a massive “not having to fuck about” upgrade.
It’s not like it’s colossally difficult to install Linux, install the
build-essentials, download the latest NVidia driver, stop your window manager, run the shell installer remembering to select the x86 packages for compatibility, disable Nouveau, and restart (repeat when there’s updates). But compared to keeping AMD up-to-date, which is just ‘install Linux and let your package manager handle it’, then it’s much more time consuming and prone to error.I’ve also been having less graphics glitch issues, but whether that’s the driver change, or whether that’s the fact that Linux has been getting much much better at everything related to gaming this last few years
My upgrade was this year from a GTX 970 to a RX 6700 XT.
I use Arch (btw) and the linux-zen kernel, so I use the nvidia-dkms module. It was much simpler, I just installed mesa and the Vulkan drivers, shutdown, installed the new GPU, booted, uninstalled nvidia-dkms.
It was a seamless transition and I had no problems with it.
Why not just install NVidia drivers using your package manager?
I woukd wait a bit longer for a real upgrade.
I don’t consider this an upgrade, it’s more of a switch. The 6700 xt new is almost the same price I can sell the 3060 ti for. I won’t be upgrading for at least 5 years.
If you ever plan on using a GPU as more than a toy for running games, then stick with Nvidia, though tbf there’s not a whole lot you could do with 8GB.
+1. Wait until the RX 7700 hits the market, it’s suppised to be in between the 4070 range.
Amd is much better on Linux, nvidia has an annoying thing for me where it stutters on every window creation, so when my notification bar spams me the system near freezes while it sorts itself out, amd is smooth as silk.
But on windows I’d probably go green, amd left a bad taste in my mouth the last few rounds.
