The reason nvidia has the r&d budget it has is because you buy their cards. AMD is just now matching them on that but they used to have about half the resources.
I mean, I buy my cards second hand because I’m dirt poor, but I still want the best option for my money. It’s a hard sell to convince people to buy inferior products to expand the market.
Except that most of nvidia’s features are borderline gimmicks or will not have a long lifespan. DLSS will eventually die and we’ll all use FSR just like it happened with gsync vs freesync. Raytracing is very taxing still for all cards in all brands to be worth it. RTX voice (just like AMD noise supression) is not something that useful (I don’t even want it). What else do you have that could make an nvidia card “superior”? The only thing I can think of is that the most recent nvidia cards are way more energy efficient than amd’s.
I just checked and it’s not thaaat close but yeah, it’s not a deal braker. From what I saw, the 7800xt consumes about 60w more than a 4070 so nvidia’s certainly better.
AMD is a lot better than before both in terms of hardware and software, far better in fact. For people that don’t buy the top of the line card every other year AMD is a real alternative, more so than in a long time.
I love my 6900XTH, killer chip. if you don’t expect ray tracing it’s an absolute monster. I bought it because it was what was available on the shelf but ultimately I feel like it was the best choice for me. I don’t think I’d buy another nvidia card for a while with the shit they’ve pulled, and I’d previously bought dozens of EVGA nvidia cards.
I just wish FSR2 could be improved to reduce ghosting. it’s already OK so any improvement would make it very good.
Buddy all of reddit is hundreds of millions of people each month. If even a small fraction of them build their own PCs, they’d have a massive impact on nVidia sales
I wasn’t able to find something outlining just the sales of the 4000 series cards, but the first graphic of this link at least has their total desktop GPU sales, which comes out to 30.34 million in 2022. Let’s put a fraction of hundreds of millions at 5% of 200 million to be generous to your argument. That’s 10 million. Then let’s say these people upgrade their GPUs once every 3 years, which is shorter than the average person, but the average person also isn’t buying top-of-the-line GPUs. So 3.33 million. 3.33/30.34 is 10.9% of sales.
So even when we’re looking at their total sales and not specifically just the current gen, assume 200 million reddit users a month when it’s closer to 300, and assume the people willing to shell out thousands of dollars for the best GPU aren’t doing so every single time a new generation comes out, we’re still at 11% of their sales.
I went with best AMD I could get at the time, 7900xtx sapphire nitro. For gaming, it’s already really good, I can use raytracing, although not on best settings on some games,but in most cases I can just max out the settings.
Main complaint atm is that self hosting AI is much more annoying than it would be on nvidia. I usually get everything to work eventually, but it always needs that extra level of technical fuckery.
I was originally eyeballing to get 3080 pre-covid then everything goes to the moon with crypto, can’t even buy 2080 under 1k. So I stuck with my 1080, some shit happened to my MB so I had to upgrade and that’s where I decide to switch to all AMD, took me another couple months before I finally snatch a 6800XT at amd direct, it was not cheap($812 CAD after tax) but like almost 500 cheaper than what you can find on any other vendor tries to gouge you with their bundles.
Quite happy with that and their software. BUT, there are some weird crash related the screen sleep after certain version of driver so I turn off screen manually. A newer driver seems to fix that about a month or 2 ago. I will wait a couple update to revert my screen sleep policy again. Most modern game runs quite well.
Honest the newer 7900 ones are priced too high so I might either skip entire gen or wait until 8900 is out then get a good 7900 XT for cheaper price. Basically I have no intention to buy any thing priced higher than 800 pre-tax.
With cheap ram and everything else, there is really no reason for GPU to still keep at that price point. Remember 3080 was priced $699? Yep, that’s where I get my budget number of <800CAD.
Funnily enough I just, like an hour before reading this post bought an AMD card. And I’ve been using NVIDIA since the early 00’s.
For me it’s good linux support. Tired of dealing with their drivers.
Will losing me as a customer make a difference to NVIDIA? Nope. Do I feel good about ditching a company that doesn’t treat me well as a consumer? Absolutely!
Absolutely indeed! I’ll never buy an Nvidia card because of how anti-customer they are. It started with them locking out PCI passthrough when I was building a gaming Linux machine like ten years ago.
I wonder if moving people towards the idea of just following the companies that don’t treat them with contempt is an angle that will work. I know Steph Sterling’s video on “consumer” vs “customer” helped crystallize that attitude in me.
I’m not familiar with that video but I’m intrigued. I’ll have to check it out.
I don’t know. I don’t have much faith in people to act against companies in a meaningful way. Amazon and Walmart are good examples. I feel like it’s common knowledge at this point that these companies are harmful but still they thrive.
I ran my 1060 just fine for a few year. Nvidia has an official, but proprietary driver that might not run well on some distro’s. Personally I haven’t had any issues, though it would be better to stick with xorg and not wayland. Wayland support on nvidia I’ve heard isn’t great, but it does work
This. You’re mostly at the mercy of their proprietary drivers. There’s issues, like lagging Wayland support as mentioned. They will generally work though, I don’t want to dissuade you from trying out Linux.
There is an open source driver too, but it doesn’t perform well.
You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.
On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.
Nvidia on Linux is better than ever before, even over the past couple of months there were tremendous improvements. As long as you use X11 you will have a pretty good gaming experience across the board, but Nvidia driver updates are often a headache. With AMD, you don’t even have to think about it, unless Davinci Resolve forces you to, but even then it’s a better situation.
Anyway, comments like “you’ll be 100% fine” are not really based on reality, occasionally Nvidia will break things. However if you use the BTRFS filesystem with Timeshift (or even that wretched Snapper) set up, then this is merely a minor inconvenience. (for example before I moved to Arch, Ubuntu pushed an Nvidia update that broke my system, happened in June…)
Depends on the distro. Otherwise you’ll have to install the nvidia drivers yourself, and if memory serves it’s not as smooth of a process as on Windows. If you use Pop OS you should be golden, as that Linux distro does all the work for you.
I was hooked. It was the first time my PC felt as transparent and lie-free as notebook paper.
Like, there’s nothing to hide because nothing is. It’s pure, truthful freedom and that meant more to me than raw usability. I tried to do everything possible on Linux that i was told I couldn’t do, hell, I ran Team Fortress 2 and Half Life in wine way pre-proton.
I recall exactly once back in the day that Ubuntu actually just played audio through a laptop I installed it on and I damn near lost my mind.
like 30 minutes ago I installed Mint on a laptop and literally everything just worked as if I installed windows from the backup image. (I’m not sure power states are working 100% but it’s close enough and probably would with 3rd party driver)
I used some Ubuntu derivative for recording shitty music me and my buddy made in a trailer. OSS off of a turtle beach soundcard with a hacked together driver, crammed into a shitty Windows Vista era desktop.
I felt like some sort of junk wizard.
I use arch these days, Garuda mainly. I’ve done the whole song and dance from Arch to Gentoo. I know the system, now I want to relax and let something I suck at, giving myself features be more in the hands of a catering staff of folks and the Garuda boys know how to pamper.
The dragons kinda… yeah, the art’s kinda cringe but damn, this is the definition of fully featured.
I was definitely a junk wizard back in the day, as I’ve grown older and have less time and more money I just want stuff that works. I used to build entire (pretty acceptably decent) home theater systems out of $150 worth of stuff off craigslist and yard sales. When you know how it all works you can cobble together some real goofy shit that works.
It’s about the exact amount of cringe I expect from a non mainstream linux distro. but aye who doesn’t like dragons and eagles? I’ll have to try it out on this old zenbook.
Similarly if nvidia wanted me to buy their cards they’d get their drivers sorted out. While plugging in an amd card just works with literally no setup from me, nvidia will get no money from me
Well when AMD finally catches up with nVidia and offers a high-end GPU with FG and decent Ray Tracing, I’ll gladly switch. I’d love nothing more than to have an all-AMD PC.
oh don’t get me wrong, when nvidia is an option for linux it seems to work ok, while maybe an older driver, but some distros are a pain to get the nvidia driver installed, or are designed around AMD like ChimeraOS. Not sure if you can still add nvidia to that distro, I haven’t tried yet.
Ok, maybe don’t use an os that is designed around AMD if you have an Nvidia GPU.
I used Pop!_OS, Ubuntu and arch (current os) and it worked great on every single one. I did a downgrade on arch three times now (average once every 10 months or so), but to be frank I did the same for other software, that’s more an arch thing than a Nvidia thing.
It’s also the most up to date driver, at least on arch.
There’s also Linux Mint and ZorinOS to name others that have good built-in nvidia support.
The point of my comments was to highlight how linux doesn’t universally work well with nvidia unless you get a distro that’s more compatible or user friendly with nvidia drivers. I mentioned ChimeraOS solely as an example of one that openly says it doesn’t support nvidia, even though it’s possible you may be able to install it separately.
Your comments have confirmed what I said: that nvidia generally has the best compatibility [with games, emulators, etc] compared to AMD, unless you’re on linux, at which point you have to go to specific distros or go through the PITA process of making it work, when AMD generally just works.
So the suggestion that no one should buy nvidia until they drop prices is simply DOA on arrival, because nvidia is still the most compatible, and the linux market share where it might be a problem is not that big.
at which point you have to go to specific distros or go through the PITA process of making it work, when AMD generally just works.
Ok, I agree with this point.
My counterargument is that those “specific distros” make up the vast majority of desktop Linux use. So it’s less that you have to choose a specific distro and more that you have to avoid niche distros.
Doesn’t invalidate the core of your argument though.
I’m just pointing out the well-known compatibility issues that are evident if you spend any amount of time browsing a linux support channel, which would be the only solid argument for not buying nvidia cards en masse aside from pricing (or if you wanted to build a hackintosh), if the linux userbase was significant enough or if there weren’t other distros to choose from.
Otherwise the vast majority of compatibility issues I see for pc gaming or emulation is in regards to AMD cards, so I wouldn’t bother buying one of those, no matter how much more affordable they might be. Just not worth the trouble when nVidia generally works as expected, or driver fixes are delivered faster.
edit: unless it’s a game bafflingly designed around AMD, like Starfield apparently
People did stop buying them. Their consumer GPU shipments are the lowest they’ve been in over a decade.
But consumer habits aren’t the reason for the high prices. It’s the exploding AI market. Nvidia makes even higher margins on chips they allocate to parts for machine learning in data centers. As it is, they can’t make enough chips to fill the demand for AI.
Add comment