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.
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.
The current gen consoles having pretty weak raytracing will play for AMD quite a bit here. It means that games can’t demand anything higher than a PS5 can do, and since AMD provide that then their stuff will still do for modern PC games.
The frame generation is a red herring in my book. A quick look at a few videos shows similar artifacts to what my 4K TV made if you leave the awful motion smoothing settings on. 40-50fps with VRR is a much better “make the poorly optimised game playable” goal.
Not OC, but per my last experience with it NVENC was way easier to work with.
You install the NVIDIA drivers, you install CUDA libs (in Fedora that’s separate, at least) and it works.
For AMD, you need to figure out that you need the proprietary driver for AMF (which didn’t have a proper installer for anything that wasn’t Ubuntu the last time I tried it) or be stuck with the unfortunately not as good VAAPI. After that you usually had to hunt for guides on how to use the encoder in the program you want (OBS used to be a particular nightmare for it, hopefully it got better with time).
I hope things got and continue to get better, specially since I’m 100% going to get an AMD setup after my laptop eventually dies.
Still everyone uses Nvidia and everything has better Nvidia support than AMD. I love AMD but not being able to use my oculus connected to my PC without screen tear is pretty annoying :/
Can’t speak for Microsoft users (except - abandon all hope), but since Kernel 5.4 I’ve been on 2 different Radeons and a vega. Zero drivers. Just latest STABLE Mesa. If the game worked on Protondb, it worked for me.
Keen to see how FSR3 ends up looking, if it comes within decent parity to DLSS3 it’s going to be amazing, considering it’s hardware agnostic so theoretically console devs can use it to boost framerates.
AMD confirmed works on console. First impressions by Digital Foundry etc said it exceeded expectations, however they weren’t allowed to play it. Hopefully lag isn’t terrible
Have I just had bad luck with my AMD products?
I’ve had four Nvidia GPU/Intel CPU computers with no issues.
I’ve had three AMD GPU/AMD CPU computers and they all have been loud and hot and slightly unstable. A bit cheaper sure, but I rather have a silent and stable experience.
This has made me see amd as the inferior lowbudget crap. But maybe I have just bought from the wrong manufacturer or something.
Maybe, because cpu wise amd should be doing better than intel on heat and power consumption. Loud would have to do with the cooler you choose and wouldn’t be a function of the cpu itself. Aftermarket coolers are often better than stock and not that pricey, but will want to look into reviews for a quiet one. Amd had been cleaning intel’s clock the past few generations in cpu performance. Intel has finally caught up again and is slightly ahead in power this gen, though amd still winning a lot in efficiency and power consumption/heat and still has the best gaming cpu. Good summary here.
In terms of gpu that’s gonna vary widely depending on what specific gpu and what configuration of that gpu you’re buying. Before buying I would look into specific reviews of that manufacturer if you can and not just the stock gpu itself, because every one is going to have a different configuration and fan/cooler setup for the gpu. Unfortunately gpus from both amd and Nvidia are becoming more and more power hungry giant heat generating monsters over time.
This is the general trend in my roughly two decades of having my own PCs, so your mileage may well vary, especially since some series of both CPUs and GPUs were just better/more compatible with each other than now or the other way around.
In case anyone’s curious, my current combo is Ryzen 7 3800X and RTX 3060.
You have almost the same setup as I do right now.
3900x and a 3080.
Took me four cpu fan switches until I could stand being in the same room. Stock fan, sounded like a drying cabinet. BeQuiet, loud. Noctua, less loud but still loud. Im using a radiator now with silentwing fans and it’s still slightly too loud for my taste (and louder than any Intel I’ve ever had).
Temps seem to be in normal range though.
I went with idiotproof watercooling for the CPU and a mid-range quiet-type cabinet and it’s whisper-quiet and well within optimal temperature range even at high load.
Ive only ever used amd gpus and intel cpu, and the only hardware issue ive had is one gigabyte card having a firmware bug that killed it. amd always worked great on windows for me, but on linux they suffer from crashing quite often.
You have just been unlucky. I’ve never had any such issue. Were you using stock CPU cooler? I’ll admit the CPU cooler that comes in the box with AMD is atrocious.
I could not even be in the same room when using the stock cooler on my 3900x that I have now.
Had to use a radiator with silentwing fans to get it acceptable.
I can’t speak of older stuff, but my Ryzen 5 5600x and RX 6800 have been great. I’ve had this pc for a year now, and only have had the GPU drivers crash twice. That is about on par with my older gtx 1070
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.
My problem when buying my last GPU is that AMD’s answer to CUDA, ROCm, was just miles behind and not really supported on their consumer GPUs. From what I se now that has changed for the better, but it’s still hard to trust when CUDA is so dominant and mature. I don’t want to reward NVIDIA, but I want to use my GPU for some deep learning projects too and don’t really have a choice at the moment.
I’ve become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don’t rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia’s market share. It makes sense.
The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it’s just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don’t seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they’re doing. Thus, the constant idea that people “buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing”.
But if AMD cards can’t really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn’t certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven’t thought of yet. I guess they’re right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that’s all they ever do.
If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren’t that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they’re worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven’t bought, yet. I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I’ve never heard the reverse. I’ve never heard somebody say they’d like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.
The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that’s the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.
I’ve also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.
No, dummy, AMD can’t run a lot of important shit that you don’t care about. There’s more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Well the counterpoint is that NVIDIA’s Linux drivers are famously garbage, which also pisses off professionals. From what I see from AMD now with ROCm, it seems like they’ve gone the right way. Maybe they can convince me next time I’m on the lookout for a GPU.
But overall you’re right yeah. My feeling is that AMD is competitive with NVIDIA regarding price/performance, but NVIDIA has broader feature support. This is both in games and in professional use cases. I do feel like AMD is steadily improving in the past years though. In the gaming world FSR seems almost as ubiquitous (or maybe even more ) as DLSS, and ROCm support seems to have grown rapidly as well. Hopefully they keep going, so I’ll have a choice for my next GPU.
It’s a shame there’s not really an equivalent comparison to the CUDA cores on AMD cards, being able to offload rendering to the GPU and getting instant feedback is so important when sculpting (without having to fall back to using eevee)
I’ve been using Nvidia with Linux for a VERY long time. Currently I have computers running:
GT1030 - two older PC
GTX2060 Ti
GTX 3050 Ti - laptop
They are all working fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. I install openSUSE, add the Nvidia community repo (a couple of clicks), run updates once, and reboot. Everything just works after that. I can count maybe 3 times in the past 6 years that there was any issue at all.
Now Ubuntu and derivative… I’ve had a LOT of issues and weirdness… drivers failing, doing weird things etc.
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