I’ve had a Nvidia card for a long time (just built my new pc 2 months ago) Wayland worked mostly ok for me the last year. But I’ve used x11 until 2023, so I can’t really sayhow it was.
nvidia just works better on linux. Well… I heard that’s changed so this may no longer be relevant
This isn’t and has never been the case. Nvidia and AMD are comparable performance-wise on Linux these days, but since the Nvidia drivers are proprietary, they’re automatically harder to deal with than the open-source AMD drivers. For that reason alone, AMD is easier to use with Linux out of the box, because the Linux kernel has AMD drivers built in. You still have to install userspace drivers in either case, but the open-source AMD userspace drivers have outperformed Nvidia’s proprietary drivers for a long time. It’s only been within the last couple years that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers have reached parity with AMD’s open-source ones.
For a long time your options were a closed source driver from nVidia that worked, an open source reverse engineered driver for nVidia cards that didn’t work, a closed source AMD driver that wasn’t very good and lagged behind the PC version by a big distance, or an open source AMD driver that lacked many features and didn’t support the newest cards.
Maybe in the last 5 years things have started to change, but for a long time, if you were willing to use the closed-source nvidia drivers, they were just the good option that worked for most cards.
I think AMD is a great competitor and we need more competition to lay it to NVIDIA and AMD as well, BUT HOLY FUCK. I can’t stand AMD’s software/control panel vs NVIDIA’s.
Well I guess there’s two parts of the nvidia software experience, geforce and the control panel. The control panel is functionally fine, but the ui is very dated and the available features are a bit limited. Geforce is pretty widely reviled as far as I can tell so I won’t go into it.
I just find the amd ui nice, and I like how you get quite simple and direct control over your video card, eg you can do some simple oc/undervolting, choose which software special sauce you want at a glance, and so on.
My first-ever Nvidia card was a 3080Ti. After installation I was genuinely confused and kept clicking around everywhere looking for the real settings panel.
Actually I remember, my older laptop had a MX150 (lol) so I did know all about GeForce Control Panel and Experience—I just thought they were the outdated bargain-basement solution assigned to POS hardware like mine, not worth (understandably) slapping shiny new chrome on.
Subsequently I had automatically assumed without a doubt in my mind that the pandemic card I had paid for in tainted blood would have some uber slick new interface that I couldn’t wait to play around with.
Needless to say, my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined.
Aye. The Nvidia control center was cool when I installed it for my Ti 4600 in 2002 and not much has changed. I’m not particularly fond but the aesthetics of the Radeon software, but it beats the heck out of the semi-useless GeForce experience. I have to make an account just to see if there’s a driver update available? I can’t even control fan speeds in Windows without third party software?
They’re both bad but in comparison Nvidia’s offering is garbage.
You don’t need an account for drivers. You can still get those for free off their website just like you could in 1999. You only need an account for their experience app.
If it can run them… I sold mine because they never actually fixed the drivers. Out of hundreds of games on my PC, it was able to run 3-4. This isn’t before their updates either. This happened 2 weeks ago. It can’t run davinci resolve despite having good encoders, it couldn’t even fucking run valorant Also they are only good in benchmarks, I found that my old 3050 was outperforming it in terms of fps.
AMD has been great and all buy their prices are NOT affordable. They’ve been jaking up their prices like everyone else in the last years. Don’t paint them as the heroes.
As far as I searched what is free software is the Vulkan implementation that runs on top of the intrinsic GPU and drivers (that have DRM and no source code).
The intrinsic GPU drivers on the kernel are still close source. So basically AMD and NVIDIA are the same. They both have source for some engines implementation but both kernel drivers are close source.
I like AMD but they’re still overpriced, nothing compelling in the $200-300 range since 5600 XT and RX 580, and I keep hearing stories about unoptimized drivers (can’t confirm myself cause I’m still on 5600 XT with mostly older games). They’re the lesser of two evils, but they’re far from chad-doge behavior at this point.
My rig is full AMD (5800x/5700xt), but that's purely because they happened to be the better value at the time. The second they get a lead in the consumer GPU market (which they likely will since nvidia simply doesn't care about it vs the ML market now) prices are going to rise again.
And don't pretend that these prices are anything resembling affordable. That would be when you could get a legitimately mid-range card for ~$150 (rx580).
Correct. But AMD is doing things that benefit FOSS and Linux, where as nVidia is a menace. Intel is also doing pretty decent, they just need to catch up in terms of driver features.
Man, I could use another $200 MSRP mid-range card. I’m also running RX5700XT (for $430!) and it’s probably going to be the first card I will use until it dies, unless there’s a reasonably priced mid-range coming out soon.
I have that card too but i think it was closer to 500 when i bought it. I felt like i got a terrible price but it was better than what folks after me had to deal with. Itcs still a great card and i hope it outlasts this crazy price gouging.
Mine was literally the last in stock before prices went wild when covid started. I was using rx480 and didn’t really need to upgrade until Gamers Nexus published a video about GPU shortage.
My hope right now is for AMD to keep improving on FSR so this card can stay viable for more years.
Yep. I’m running a Ryzen CPU for the first time as of late last year because the 5950X was on sale and Intel had no competing options anywhere near the same price. It was 16c/32t AMD for like $220 or the same core and thread count for $560 from Intel.
I just bought my first Nvidia card since the TNT2. Up to today I always looked for the most FPS for the money.
This time my focus was on energy efficiency, and the AMD cards suck at the moment. 4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
Regarding DLSS: I activated it in control, and it looks… off? Edges seem unsharp, not all the time, but often, sometimes only for a second, sometimes longer. I believe it is the only game I have that has support for it, but I’m not impressed.
At OP: Brand loyality is the worst. Neither Nvidia nor AMD like you. Get the best value for your money.
Btw, Nvidia needed an account to let me use their driver. Holy shit, that’s fucked up!
When you install the drivers there is a checkbox for geforce experience. I think you need to do “custom installation” or advanced or whatever they call it instead of just clicking the install button they show.
4070 about 200w, 6800 about 300w. AMD really has to fix that.
But if you compare cards from the same generation, like the 3070 and 6800, they’re much closer. Nvidia still has the edge, but the 3070 TGP is 220W vs the 6800 at 250W.
You don’t necessarily need an account to use the Nvidia drivers, just if you want automatic updates through GeForce Experience. Not saying that’s any better, in fact it’s almost as shitty, just wanted to clarify.
I just used a junk email to make an account for the auto updates.
Well, I feel like a he/they/it. I don’t know if you mean it the way I interpret it but… I was raised in a way and time that felt to nudge me towards masculinity having been AMAB. But I don’t feel like I fully subscribe to the idea of being a “man” a “he”. But also for whatever reason I do mostly fit under that gender identity, and have always used he/him. So now-a-days I’m thinking of myself as more of a “he/they”. Mix in a bit of existential thinking, and a general lack of care about my pronouns… I’ve literally thought about putting “he/they/it” as my pronouns.
But I’ve refrained out of concern it would be taken as being dismissive of other’s gender identity, and/or the idea of gender identity altogether. When I only feel that way about my own gender identity.
So yeah, I saw your name and identified with it, it brought a little joy to my day, and wanted to share that with you.
And now, for a serious note: been running linux daily for almost 20 years and AMD machines are, per my personal experience, always smoother to install, run and maintain.
I've been intel w/ nvidia since 2007 on Linux. Recent trends have me thinking AMD is the way to go for my next one though. I think I've got so used to the rough edges of Nvidia that they stopped bothering me.
As someone who has been ignoring AMD for most of this time, (my last AMD product was something in the Athlon XP line), can I do Intel CPU w/ AMD discrete GPU?
Yeah, this is what my wife was doing. I’m also doing the reverse: AMD CPU, NVidia GPU. I considered AMD but went NVidia mostly for the PPW on an undervolted 4070. It results in a cool, quiet, low-wattage machine that can handle anything that matters to me, which AMD GPUs still can’t match this gen even with the upcoming 7800XT they’re trying to compare against the 4070. I’d wait for some PPW analysis before making a choice depending on your needs. There’s way more to the analysis than GPU source code or even raw performance that is often overlooked.
Oh,and don’t sleep on AMD. Though I don’t feel like the AM5 platform is fully baked, Ryzen architecture is rock-solid and I fully recommend using it if your history with Athlon is what’s keeping you away. I actively avoided them for the same reason until a friend convinced me otherwise, and I’m so glad I did.
Can’t speak to that, unfortunately. But I assume there would be no issues. The devices themselves are system agnostic; Windows isn’t doing anything special to make them play nice with each other.
I’m about to put together a machine based on a AB350 chipset, with a Ryzen 5 (g series, for graphics from the start) and after that I intend to install on it a budget RX580.
If the thing doesn’t ignite or explode, I’ll gladly share the end result.
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