If you want the best support in Linux games your choice IMO is Nvidia and will be for some time until AMD sort out their new driver.

The truth is a bit more nuanced. Feral games don't officially support AMD cards but they have spent a lot of time working with Mesa to make them work. In fact, the only game of theirs that doesn't currently work with Mesa is Alien: Isolation due to reasons beyond their control. Stuff like Grid runs pretty well and its performance has gotten even better due to Feral's continuing patching and interest in Mesa. With Kernel 4.5 officially released performance and drivers on newer AMD cards should be improved by quite a bit on account of AMD's ongoing driver strategy (of using a common base for both proprietary and open drivers in the kernel itself.

My advice to you is to therefore get the newest Kernel and Mesa. Depending on your distro this could be either pretty easy or somewhat of a hassle. If you tough it out with catalyst and an older kernel instead, you should get acceptable performance anyhow. Not as good as on Windows nor with an Nvidia card, but I know people with 380(x)s who manage just fine.

Just try out games and ask around if you're having trouble getting things to work. There's plenty of AMD users on GOL and things are not as bad as they might first seem. Nvidia is still the best performing with its proprietary drivers but things are continuously improving for AMD users.

Oh thanks for the replies it has given me some hope.

To be honest 3 years ago I bought a nice laptop with an nvidia 740M chip and it was a pain to use it with linux because It had that hybrid thing that was totally unsuported on linux. That was the reason of the popular Linus Torvalds "Fuck you!!" to nvidia. And then I heard that AMD was on the right path to support linux so when I saw a good deal on the 390 I said "why not?".

When kernel 4.5 with AMDGPU comes around, things should get much better. Are you using Ubuntu?

Quoting: AnxiousInfusionWhen kernel 4.5 with AMDGPU comes around, things should get much better. Are you using Ubuntu?

True story indeed. I do hope the amdgpu driver will be good to go in the future - atm I do plan to switch to the upcoming nVidia next-gen GPUs. In case AMD gonna improve amdgpu in the future I might buy on of their GPUs again.

So... the situation is not that good and I would not go for AMD atm - but hopefully it's getting better and it already did.