I have currently a RX 6700XT and I’m quite happy with it when it comes to gaming and regular desktop usage, but was recently doing some local ML stuff and was just made aware of huge gap NVIDIA has over AMD in that space.

But yeah, going back to NVIDIA (I used to run 1080) after going AMD… seems kinda dirty for me ;-; Was very happy to move to AMD and be finally be free from the walled garden.

I thought at first to just buy a second GPU and still use my 6700XT for gaming and just use NVIDIA for ML, but unfortunately my motherboard doesn’t have 2 PCIe slots I could use for GPUs, so I need to choose. I would be able to buy used RTX 3090 for a fair price, since I don’t want to go for current gen, because of the current pricing.

So my question is how is NVIDIA nowadays? I specifically mean Wayland compatibility, since I just recently switched and would suck to go back to Xorg. Other than that, are there any hurdles, issues, annoyances, or is it smooth and seamless nowadays? Would you upgrade in my case?

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I’m currently using GNOME on Arch(btw), since that might be relevant

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    3·
    8 months ago

    I run a 1080 on Ubuntu and it works fine. Need to disable secure boot, install the proprietary drivers, and maybe change a setting or two, but it works. I have no idea how well it’d work on one of the “you go figure it out yourself” distros like Arch or its derivatives.

    On Wayland, my setup had all kinds of hardware acceleration issues, mostly on Firefox. Games seem to work fine, but I couldn’t be bothered to fix Firefox issue. One of my HDMI cables is going bad and I’m too lazy to buy new ones, which causes weird issues sometimes; those issues cause weird freezes on X11 and crash the Wayland session entirely. So until I stop being lazy, I’ll stick to X11 for a while.

    My laptop has a Pascal GPU and it mostly works. There are some weird display issues, but they’re also present when I have the Nvidia GPU disabled entirely. I can’t get more than 30fps on the HDMI when I disable the laptop display, though, so something about that setup is breaking my ability to hook it up to a TV and close it. Maybe it’s the mux chip? Maybe it’s the GPU? I can’t tell. It’s running Manjaro, so driver installation wasn’t as bad as I would’ve expected. I did need to edit a text file in /etc to get the Nvidia driver to load properly, though, or Wayland wouldn’t detect any external screens.

    From what I’ve read, the modern cards are in kind of a weird situation. On the one hand, you have open source drivers now, on the other hand, there still seem to be many issues. Nvidia has tons of tooling for machine learning and such, but AMD cards have much more VRAM for the price. If I would buy a GPU now, I’d probably go AMD and fight ROCm to make the ML stuff work.