As others have mentioned, this is super old. Also, catalyst is not nearly as reckless and dangerous as it should be. It was more like letting a drunk child drive a school bus.
I’m going team red because I’m not booting into Windows just to play Starfield. Not having open source video drivers is a recipe to get massively fucked later on down the line as the enshitification of computers continue.
Catalyst doesn’t exist anymore, it was replaced by AMDGPU-PRO years ago.
The Radeon Mesa driver (radeonsi) is generally faster than AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL for gaming, and has been for years. On the Vulkan side, performance is usually fairly close between the Mesa driver (RADV), AMDVLK and AMDGPU-PRO.
AMDGPU is just the kernel driver, which is used by both the Mesa drivers and AMDGPU-PRO, so why is it listed separately?
For Intel, I think the hardware was holding it back more than the driver, especially since they’ve replaced the classic Mesa drivers with Gallium based ones. But now they’re doing the Arc stuff.
I don’t know if I would say that Nvidia proprietary runs well
I currently have an Arc A770 LE, haven’t benchmarked it under Linux but have done plenty of Blender renders under GPU compute as well as played plenty of games and so far haven’t experienced any issues under the Mesa driver
The fact that 4 of these drivers are part of mesa and OP doesn’t know the name of the first one (probably r600, as radeonsi and radv are what is meant by amdgpu) shows the questionabilty of this chart. Also OP never tried to run Wayland or KMS on NVIDIA. Granny can drive better than that.
AMD is probably the best choice for Linux now, not that nVidia isn’t still as fast for gaming, but there are a number of limitations to using both the proprietary and open source nVidia driver, and proprietary is the only option for nVidia if you want decent performance.
My wife had huge problems with xruns due to some sort of bug in the nVidia proprietary driver running with a real time kernel.
Xrun is when the Audio doesn’t fill buffers in time, usually it’s just a few milliseconds and mostly inaudible, but it’s no good, if you are making music.
I’m sure for most either is fine today. But if you want to engage in open source development, AMD is by far the best choice, because the open source driver is much more well behaved, both than the nVidia open source and proprietary drivers.
Not saying they aren’t good. Optane and Xeon Phi were actually good. What I’m saying is that knowing Intel’s history, there’s a very high chance they’ll also abandon their GPU division just like they did with Optane and Xeon Phi.
There’s a wide range of options to go against NVIDIA when using Linux:
Not Open Source
Calls home to momma (often) with more info than it strictly needs- though some would put this in the column of win for faster reponse to fixes
Constant game of whack a mole with drivers, versions, updates breaking things
Ease of use
WAY overpriced (let’s call AMD at least overpriced though)
I decided to go AMD 6+ years ago, and gaming is consistently good, I have spent a total of zero time fucking with drivers, and appreciate that AMD invests in the community vs. just profiting from it and the bang for the buck is a nice addition.
I tell everyone I know considering a gaming rig build to just go AMD - near same performance, better pricing, better drivers and company support / policies
I’m on X and every time I launch a game I haven’t played in a while, there’s a high chance that it will have low FPS, stutter or just straight up won’t work anymore. This isn’t about starfield, it happens with every single game I play. Titanfall 2 is a recent example. It runs better on my steam deck than it does on my PC with a 1070 Ti. It used to run well about a year ago.
If the proton version didn’t change, the issue is always the nvidia driver. But since I don’t know when it broke, I have to try a few different versions to find one that works well with that game, which might break others.
It was a similar story on windows, I used to just not update the driver unless I absolutely had to.
It’s been a while since I had an AMD card, but there was only one time when I saw a driver regression and my friends with AMD cards also don’t have any issues. They’re on windows, but I assume that this aspect transfers to linux with AMD just like it does for nvidia.
Used Nvidia for years, got tired of it. I used to keep a list of all the problems but I got tired of posting it.
Off the top of my head, gaming at all on Nvidia used to break KDE on X if you disabled the compositor for performance, the whole UI would visually freeze. FFXIV and WoW would crash constantly until DXVK put in special handling for the Nvidia driver. Wayland still has issues which means users with mixed refresh rates or VRR have to choose what features to sacrifice. Optimus laptop graphics switching support is a goddamn joke on Linux, only supported on a couple generations and it barely works there. Video hardware acceleration never worked on Firefox, no idea if it does now.
I installed an AMD GPU about a year ago and I’ve literally not thought about it once since. It just works, it doesn’t cause problems, I don’t have to do anything with drivers. I’m never gonna go back unless they get a fully functional open source driver stack.
Also nvidia doesn’t support so many APIs, so so things like loading screens break, it also makes it impossible to report kernel issues due to a tainted kernel
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