NVIDIA have announced their new "GeForce RTX SUPER Series" lineup

Quoting: ShmerlNvidia has a bad history of support when it comes to drivers

I'm rather curious about this, can you qualify your statement? I've avoided AMD/ATI gpus for quite a few years for two reasons:

• Build Quality -- it seemed like no matter what the build or price range of card, I'd have issues after a year, give or take.
• The drivers were buggy on both windows and linux, and the linux support in particular was bad.

Now, while I like open source, what I really care about is that it works. Maybe it's just my distro choices over the years but I've always found Nvidia support to be excellent in that the official drivers just worked.

That said, it's been quite a while since I've revisited that.


Last edited by dibz on 2 July 2019 at 8:34 pm UTC

Quoting: dibzI'm rather curious about this, can you qualify your statement?

Basically tons if issues due to Nvidia not providing upstream driver (so it had no functional DRM/KMS for years, and even today it is barely working). That caused a whole list of problems, from defunct Optimus (no PRIME) to defunct Wayland / XWayland scenario support. I call it horrible, not excellent. Remember Linus showing them the middle finger? While that's the wrong way to send the message, he reacted exactly on these kind of issues.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 July 2019 at 8:45 pm UTC

Quoting: EMO GANGSTERthe performance, thanks for the info, see I made windows host pc to play games I can't play on Linux through steam play and I wanted to get a new card for the main system and move 1060 to host pc I connect to though steam streaming and want to find the best card for the money that works best with my Linux system.

If you want to do it today, replacing 1060, you can try Vega 56 or RX 590. Vega 56 is better. If you can wait, see how upcoming Navi cards will perform. Though so far there is no radv support for Navi yet, and it can take some time to come out.

Quoting: ShmerlAMD claim they did, and I don't see why they would make that up.

You really take what a company says at face value?

Quoting: ShmerlIf you want more details, see overview of their new microarch. They basically put people who worked on optimizing Zen to work on RDNA. Their focus was to optimize power consumption explicitly. So Nvidia lost their edge now, but as with Zen vs Intel, it will take a few iterations to polish stuff. With Zen it took them 3 generations to start beating Intel point blank.

No AMD didn't caught up to NVidia. From AMD's own numbers Navi has slightly lower power efficiency than Turing even with a full node advantage! (7nm vs 12nm)
From all the rumours I've seen it doesn't seem like AMD will be able to beat Intel in gaming performance with Zen2. Not that it will matter much given the current horrid price of Intel cpus and the likely small performance difference.

Also AMD vs NVidia is way different than AMD vs Intel.
Intel sat there basically doing (almost) nothing for years and Intel also has a very BIG problem with its fabs.
On the other hand NVidia didn't stay idle and kept on improving gen after gen. Nvidia is also fabless just like AMD.

Quoting: ShmerlAre you even answering my comment? I already said it above. Nvidia has a bad history of support when it comes to drivers.

You mean the awful support history that made NVidia the only sane choice on Linux until AMD released Polaris 3 years ago?

On the other hand AMD has stellar support with eg my 2200G that kept hard locking with Firefox just a few months ago (it probably still does but I've upgraded to an RX 570 in the meantinme).
AMD also splendidly managed to support their own Freesync on Linux after NVidia did.

But where AMD shines the most is in Vulkan support: you get 3 drivers for the price of one! Isn't that great?! Of course, AMD doesn't support the main Vulkan driver that everyone uses but that's just nitpicking!

I also do love AMD support for features like Zero fan rpm at idle: you just have to install a third party tool (fancontrol), change the code to make it behave properly and maybe you'll get that feature working! NVidia is so boring with it working perfectly without any additional tweaking!



Sorry for the rant but I've grown quite tired of AMD GPUs on Linux lately.

Quoting: gurvYou really take what a company says at face value?

Not until further tests. But it's going to be a major PR issue for them, if they made this up. They did claim a breakthrough, so how it compares to Nvidia will be shown in tests once hardware is actually out (should be soon).

Quoting: gurvFrom AMD's own numbers Navi has slightly lower power efficiency than Turing even with a full node advantage!

Also AMD vs NVidia is way different than AMD vs Intel.

Not very different. AMD were behind, it took them years to start and bring to fruition a brand new microarchitecure with Zen, same with RDNA. It's only now coming out. Zen proved itself. So we'll see how RDNA works out. I don't expect first generation of chips to be the best microarch can offer. Zen took several generations to get where it's now. Can it flop? Anything can, sure. But so far it looks good.

Quoting: gurvYou mean the awful support history that made NVidia the only sane choice on Linux until AMD released Polaris 3 years ago?

Yeah, that awful history. It was the only choice, sure due to Mesa catching up only a few years ago to all needed OpenGL features and performance. All that didn't make Nvidia blob a good choice. It was always awful, just more usable than AMD then. Today, the blob retained all the same problems, while AMD fixed theirs in Mesa. So the blob now is losing out.

Quoting: gurvAMD also splendidly managed to support their own Freesync on Linux after NVidia did.

And where is that support in compositors? Nvidia did nothing to advance adaptive sync on Linux. Nada. All they did, is unplugged their blob to work with adaptive sync monitors using their GSync, and that's about it. Good luck trying to make it work with Wayland. That effort requires collaboration, not throwing blobs over the wall. AMD may be slow to move new features, but Nvidia isn't there at all, because they don't care about collaboration. They put it all in the blob, thinking everyone should dance around it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 July 2019 at 10:34 pm UTC

I'm still happy with my trusty 1050Ti. I'm easy to please :P

Did they announced SUPER drivers ?


Last edited by a0kami on 2 July 2019 at 10:17 pm UTC

A bit of a silly/funny name, I love it. I bet it has a gazillion of transistors inside.

Won't be seeing much from AMD until end of Q1 2020, they even said so themselves. Yes there is the RX 5700 and XT but their barely able to touch the 2070 in the results we have seen so far, hopefully the XT can at least offer a good 2070 alternative, but then again the 2070 can do ray tracing at a higher performance level.

See what the 5800 5900 and 5950 bring to the table next year. Also those complaining about NVIDIA drivers, keep in mind AMD open-source ones also have plenty of problems.

Biggest annoyance with NVIDIA for me is their stupid control panel and lack of features and inability to remember settings between standby or resets (yes even config files reset to default).


Last edited by TheRiddick on 3 July 2019 at 6:56 am UTC

The only reason I upgraded my 960 was to play Just Cause 3, and that turned out to be a problem with too little RAM more than anything else. So now I have a 1070 in my Linux box and I don't see replacing that for many years yet. At that point I'll consider an AMD GPU. I always do. (The only reason I've ever steered clear is the number of issues reported on /r/linux_gaming seem greater on AMD than NVidia ... but that seems to be changing.)

I've never had problems with the Nvidia drivers working that I know of, except they don't work with Wayland and some bug that Nvidia patched shortly after release. And the hardware has been rock-solid for me, at least from EVGA and PNY. I've passed my original 660 and 750ti on to my Bro in law and they're still chugging away for him, no probs.

Buy well, buy once. That's what I say.