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Nvidia vs AMD GPUs
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syxbit Aug 7, 2020
I've had Nvidia GPUs running Arch Linux for a long time (>10 years). I'm planning to get zen2 later this year, and am wondering if AMD Linux drivers are finally better (or at least as good) as Nvidias, and would warrant my next GPU being AMD?

I care about Gnome and Steam gaming. I don't really care that Nvidia's driver is a binary blob. If it works well, I'm fine. I know many Steam games used to only support Nvidia. Not sure if that's still the case. Would any of you recommend AMD over Nvidia (or vice versa) ?

Last edited by syxbit on 7 August 2020 at 11:29 pm UTC
CatKiller Aug 7, 2020
Quoting: syxbitArch... AMD?

Probably.

The only big issue with AMD is waiting for support to trickle down to the distros. If you're using Arch, that's less of a big deal than if you're on a slower-moving distro.

You can check benchmarks in the usual places to see the relative performance of the cards that fit in your budget.
mrdeathjr Aug 8, 2020
Quoting: syxbitI've had Nvidia GPUs running Arch Linux for a long time (>10 years). I'm planning to get zen2 later this year, and am wondering if AMD

Linux drivers are finally better (or at least as good) as Nvidias, and would warrant my next GPU being AMD?

I care about Gnome and Steam gaming.

I don't really care that Nvidia's driver is a binary blob.
If it works well, I'm fine.

I know many Steam games used to only support Nvidia.

Not sure if that's still the case. Would any of you recommend AMD over Nvidia (or vice versa) ?

This is a one reason because I have nvidia card without forget nvenc because amd dont have anything similar than nvenc (cuda 11 + nvenc 10)



Last edited by mrdeathjr on 8 August 2020 at 1:06 am UTC
Koopacabras Aug 8, 2020
you make your own judgement, just my two cents, most of proton games work better with AMD, and usually dxvk developers will fix issues with AMD on proton pretty quickly, and dxvk developers are on AMD. In my opinion nvidia and amd drivers have equal peformance it depends what games you want to run, some games will run better on AMD some on NVIDIA. Valve is putting a lot of effort on AMD drivers and probably AMD drivers are going get better over time faster than NVIDIA. Just my opinion there's other things to consider, Nvidia gui for example is better, or if you need AI machine learning stuff, or opencl.

just for an example, AMD does very good in some games, like this benchmark of Red Dead Redemption 2, the fact that it's faster than windows drivers, demostrates that AMD drivers have come a long way.

Last edited by Koopacabras on 8 August 2020 at 3:57 am UTC
Xpander Aug 8, 2020
Performance and price wise Nvidia and AMD are pretty similar in most cases. The problem with AMD is that they don't have any high end GPU at all. but 5700XT is pretty good GPU compared to similar price range Nvidia offerings.
That being said. Video recording is still terrible on AMD. Some games still have weird corner cases with AMD, driver regressions are happening, etc.. that being said.. Nvidia has also issues, but their drivers dont get updated that frequently. System freezes seem to be more common with AMD also, probably also driver/kernel related.
Jared Aug 9, 2020
I typically pick AMD GPUs for Linux. In my personal opinion, open source drivers work better than the proprietary ones. It might be due to me having an older Nvidia GPU on one of my machines , but I have always ran into issues such as screen tearing or other graphical probpems such as missing textures when using it on some Linux distributions and FreeBSD using the proprietary drivers.
crt0mega Aug 9, 2020
Quoting: mrdeathjrbecause amd dont have anything similar than nvenc (cuda 11 + nvenc 10)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#VA-API_drivers
mrdeathjr Aug 9, 2020
Quoting: crt0mega
Quoting: mrdeathjrbecause amd dont have anything similar than nvenc (cuda 11 + nvenc 10)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#VA-API_drivers

For now as other said before amd recording have issues in many areas without said quality (nvenc sdk 10)

Hopefully amd can improve video recording area in future



Last edited by mrdeathjr on 9 August 2020 at 6:44 pm UTC
Shmerl Aug 9, 2020
All drivers can have issues, but overall AMD is better these days. I see no reason to use Nvidia, especially with the whole migration to Wayland finally picking up.

I don't do video recording much, but NVENC is a lock-in API. The proper one is VAAPI. Not sure how well Nvidia supports it, AMD supports it so so. For example I still don't see hardware accelerated VP9 encoders. Looking forward to AV1 implemented in hardware.

Last edited by Shmerl on 9 August 2020 at 7:35 pm UTC
Avehicle7887 Aug 9, 2020
I have 2 systems running an AMD (RX 5500 XT) and Nvidia (RTX 2060 Super) GPU respectively. While both systems run games as expected and without any issues, the AMD one is much less of a hassle to update and maintain.

Nvidia drivers are great in gaming but lack a lot of flexibility. The kernel driver module needs to be recompiled with every kernel update (this can be a hassle for those who update their kernel often). Also you can only run 1 driver version at a time, with the open source drivers there is no such limitation.
Koopacabras Aug 10, 2020
Quoting: Avehicle7887. The kernel driver module needs to be recompiled with every kernel update
ah yes that's one of the reasons I stopped using nvidia if you like booting into different kernels, maybe manually compiled out of repos kernel, you have to run the Nvidia installer in each kernel... too much trouble. Now I'm testing multiple kernels to see how BMQ and Muqss scheduler performs if I had nvidia it would be double work.
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