So NVIDIA just doesn’t cut it on Linux/proton I’ve come to learn. Looking at the best bang//buck, it this the AMD card people are flocking to? 7800 XT maybe?
Switched everything over to AMD and have never needed to look back. It is way more It Just Works on AMD.
Love, the Steam Deck
I cannot speak for this card itself, but moving from Nvidia to AMD made my life so much easier. Wayland works a treat, and updates never leave me with a black screen from silly diver issues. However anything for local llms is a massive pain in the ass to use compared to Nvdias cuda, rocm is quite half-baked.
IMO, intel has underrated linux drivers. You get solid 3d, codecs, compute, etc. ootb. Assuming your distro supports it. You may be looking into something higher end, though.
Intel iGPUs have good drivers. Arc drivers are still developing.
I daily drive arc on linux. They’re not as bad as people say. Not fully there, but opencl support requires one package that is in most distros repos, same for video. Not saying they’re perfect, or even better than amd, but they are a lot better than people seem to think.
I’m waiting for battlemage to give them a try. I really want them to succeed.
Pop! OS with an RTX 3080 has been rock solid for me.
Nvidia on Linux is improving fast these days
I’ve got a 7800XT now and I moved from a 1070 and I’ve been happy with it overall. I’m on Fedora and I bought the 7800 kinda close to launch, so I went through some issues that seem to have been solved by now. Nothing that really made me go “gee I wish I hadn’t switched”.
I don’t do anything related to streaming, or machine learning, so I can’t really speak to it’s ability with those, but gaming has been stable, and, aside from a now solved problem with rocm, it works fine with Blender cycles (at least on Fedora 40). Davinci Resolve has worked fine too. On launch, there wasn’t VAAPI support for AV1, but that works just fine for me now. (VAAPI is the open source interface for GPU video acceleration).
Currently, I’d say the experience is perfectly fine.
I have Nvidia and now that explicit sync is out my system runs incredibly smoothly. Every game I have tried works great.
I switched from Nvidia for amd for the same reason: “and is better on Linux”.
In my experience you are just making different tradeoffs. I use pop so your mileage may vary but Nvidia was easy to use and upgrade. It’s not nearly as bad as people let on.
AMD on the other hand isn’t as seamless as people let on. And the open source drivers, while awesome, don’t let you take advantage of the codecs for video streaming or even alot of the AI ML stuff, so you switch to the proprietary drivers and they are slightly buggy.
I wish I kept my 3070ti over the 6900xt.
Unless they figure out a way to let me use av1 or rocm more easily then my next card will be Nvidia again.
Video decoding/encoding should work fine, better than Nvidia as fewer things support nvdec (the vaapi wrapper is enough though).
I have had a shit time with my 2080 TI. If I had the money I’d jump for an 7800 XT in a heartbeat.
We are not alone then. Thanks for your input!
Primarily use AMD graphics. My key issue on linux is the GPU reset situation, which can make experiences like VFIO and LookingGlass less than optimal, though there seems to be some commitment from all IHVs to improve desktop expeirence under Linux.
AMD and Valve work fairly closely on such endeavours which is neat, though we also have nvidia getting their shit together for Wayland and now offering an open kernel module (even in lieu of open, first party UMDs, for which the NVK driver is well worth investigating).
The open kernel module and NVK driver are applicable to Turing (your current GPU) and newer. Check them out.
You don’t owe it to anybody to align to a given vendor, just use what works best for you at a price point that doesn’t suck. If there are any specific use cases you’d like to know about then I’m sure the people here would be happy to test and report back.
I am all AMD both PC (currently Windows but have used Linux on systems with AMD and Nvidia over the years) and Steam Deck (of course). AMD is overall easier. That being said, Nvidia is supposedly in process of making opensource drivers. I believe they are going to be focusing on their newer cards. So it might be worth researching into any recent news on their progress. Always good to have options if you get a better deal on one vs another.
Worth noting that Nvidia only intends to open source the kernel driver. This is only half the driver, as a userspace blob will still be required, and that will remain closed and proprietary.
Ah, good to know. Though wouldn’t it still at least make it easier for people to install overall? The last time I messed with Nvidia on Linux gave me issues even with using a named supported distro on their site. Would error out about “missing headers” or something like that. Given this was many years ago and before distros would offer an Nvidia specific iso. Mostly just curious in the event that I needed to help someone that is all-in on having one of their cards.
Hard to know. Will the interface be specific to driver versions? Will it require an updated kernel driver for each userspace driver as it does now? I don’t know that we have the answers.