GeForce RTX 3060 Ti arrives December 2, hits RTX 2080 SUPER level performance

QuoteAs long as you're not going for 4K gaming, the GeForce RTS 3060 Ti seems like a winner, and would likely be exactly what I would be going for if I was going to be building a system.

Is there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

I think there will be demanding games that will benefit from high end cards even on 2560x1440, not just on 4K. After some analysis, I'm planning to get RX 6800 XT to be able eventually to play Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings with 2560x1440.

Also note, that apparently vkd3d-proton performance with Nvidia is not good, unlike with AMD. Phoronix tests don't really cover vkd3d-proton and dxvk in general, meaning those benchmarks don't tell the real story you'll be experiencing if you are using Wine / Proton, which is potentially a big amount of games. This will become more and more critical if there will be more games using DX12, which unfortunately is the current trend.

The real issue now is availability. I suspect there won't be any new cards available until next year.

Quoting: KimyrielleIs there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

I don't think there is any reason to use it for gaming on Linux these days. The only ones who might have a strong reason to use Nvidia on Linux are those who are stuck with something that's using CUDA lock-in and can't easily migrate from it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 December 2020 at 4:45 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlI think there will be demanding games that will benefit from high end cards even on 2560x1440, not just on 4K. After some analysis, I'm planning to get RX 6800 XT to be able eventually to play Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings with 2560x1440.

Also note, that apparently vkd3d-proton performance with Nvidia is not good, unlike with AMD. Phoronix tests don't really cover vkd3d-proton and dxvk in general, meaning those benchmarks don't tell the real story you'll be experiencing if you are using Wine / Proton, which is potentially a big amount of games. This will become more and more critical if there will be more games using DX12, which unfortunately is the current trend.

The real issue now is availability. I suspect there won't be any new cards available until next year.

Quoting: KimyrielleIs there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

I don't think there is any reason to use it for gaming on Linux these days. The only ones who might have a strong reason to use Nvidia on Linux are those who are stuck with something that's using CUDA lock-in and can't easily migrate from it.

I think I've decided I am going to attempt an AMD RX6800 XT as well. The big question is... where can you get one? :P

Quoting: slaapliedjeI think I've decided I am going to attempt an AMD RX6800 XT as well. The big question is... where can you get one? :P

I'm waiting for Sapphire to release their Pulse model of RX 6800 XT. But I don't think it will be available anywhere until next year at least.

Quoting: KimyrielleIs there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

When looking on ProtonDB for some game compatibilities, I found that, when people mentionned graphical bugs/artifacts, most of the time they had an AMD GPU. People with similar spec, but on nVidia, usually did not encounter these issues.
Also, I think that there is an additional parameter to specifiy when using an AMD GPU for some games.

Just my 2 cents though, I didn't go into full-fledged statistical analysis on that, it's just some kind of trend I noticed

Quoting: ShmerlAlso note, that apparently vkd3d-proton performance with Nvidia is not good, unlike with AMD. Phoronix tests don't really cover vkd3d-proton and dxvk in general, meaning those benchmarks don't tell the real story you'll be experiencing if you are using Wine / Proton, which is potentially a big amount of games. This will become more and more critical if there will be more games using DX12, which unfortunately is the current trend.

DXVK experience/performance is good on NVidia ;)

Phoronix did a few DXVK tests, maybe you missed them:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rx6800-more-performance&num=4
I have no idea how you come to the conclusion that NVidia performs worse for DXVK titles when all evidence points to the opposite.

I don't own any DX12 titles yet, but maybe you have some benchmarks to support your claims?

You can also consult https://www.protondb.com/stats by GPU (spoiler, NVidia does better)

Also there wasn't any hardware available that had comparable performance to NVidia until now so that statement is kind of silly since it was impossible get as good performance on AMD. I could say how bad the 5700XT experience was compared to a 1080TI ... but that would make as much sense as your claim.

Quoting: ShmerlThe real issue now is availability. I suspect there won't be any new cards available until next year.

Yeah, by the time I've watched a review and read the phoronix article all 6800XTs were gone >.< Supply must've lasted mere seconds and no restock in my country since then.

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: KimyrielleIs there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

I don't think there is any reason to use it for gaming on Linux these days. The only ones who might have a strong reason to use Nvidia on Linux are those who are stuck with something that's using CUDA lock-in and can't easily migrate from it.

NVENC for in home streaming, streaming and generally people who do a lot of video encoding. Because AMDs HW encoder is horrid in comparison (quality, performance)

Also couldn't get VR working on AMD without compiling a specific git mesa version. Even then it was a stuttery and unstable mess - for a card that was released over a year prior. Great experience ^^

Quoting: Kimyrielle

QuoteAs long as you're not going for 4K gaming, the GeForce RTS 3060 Ti seems like a winner, and would likely be exactly what I would be going for if I was going to be building a system.

Is there still a reason to go for NVidia rather than AMD these days? I am shopping around for a new system too, but have basically ruled out NVidia, because AMD seems to be the much better deal these days, and getting rid of their proprietary driver rubbish is an added plus.

Ray tracing is coming, and it is to be expected that it will be ubiquitous real fast now. And you can check on gamer nexus bench for RT on 3060TI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9H2PfYDFok which will tell you why you should go nvidia from that point (for gaming at least)... And the more modern the game/RT implem, the worst it is. RT is coming to Linux too when you see all the moves around vulkan ray tracing etc. I don't know if dlss will come to linux/dxvk etc too, I certainly hope so (and I suspect from leaks dlss 3.0 is near and will bring dlss to most games...), and then this will be a massive burial.
As such, unless you plan to change card in 1 year, you should not look at raster performance, but at more interesting RT, and nvidia utterly dominates here, a 400€ card is better than the 700€ card for AMD. Also, AMD MSRP is a total lie, and even when they are in stock, I don't expect to see any card at less than 100€ more than msrp or not before a very long time, making it not much of a sweet deal in the end. At least nvidia has founder editions to control the price.
Also, whether we like it or not (I don't but well), CUDA is here to stay too... And CUDA is Nvidia. Now, the experience is certainly better than opencl overall, so I'm not gonna blame anyone for staying on CUDA/Nvidia either. Just it is a pain in the ass to setup sometimes... That is smthg I'd love for Nvidia to open source more the framework so we can use/install it more easily.

Now, AMD has open source driver, which is a big pro, and I wish Nvidia could finally open at least the kernel module. But without RT perf to back it, AMD cards will become expensive open source paperweights before long, and for compute, it lacks CUDA, so is basically non existant.


Last edited by 3zekiel on 2 December 2020 at 12:45 pm UTC

Quoting: poisond[...] I have no idea how you come to the conclusion that NVidia performs worse for DXVK titles when all evidence points to the opposite.

I don't own any DX12 titles yet, but maybe you have some benchmarks to support your claims? [...]

I can't link to benchmarks, but I can point you at user YoRHa-2B - who actually works on DXVK - and their comments regarding NVIDIA, such as:
"On Nvidia though? Complete dogshit. Horizon Zero Dawn runs significantly slower on a 1080 Ti than it does on my RX 480 (...)"
and
"(vkd3d) has some cursed workarounds for Nvidia driver/hardware limitations to improve stability"
I'll let you look around for yourself for a bigger picture, but the impression I get as well, is that NVIDIA's drivers have issues with DXVK that don't exist with AMD.

Quoting: poisondYou can also consult https://www.protondb.com/stats by GPU (spoiler, NVidia does better)

By 6% for Platinum ratings and 1% for Silver and Bronze. With the disparity between the amount of AMD and NVIDIA user, that's pretty much within noise ratio.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled flame-war :P


Last edited by Cybolic on 2 December 2020 at 3:07 pm UTC

Quoting: 3zekielRay tracing is coming, and it is to be expected that it will be ubiquitous real fast now. And you can check on gamer nexus bench for RT on 3060TI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9H2PfYDFok which will tell you why you should go nvidia from that point (for gaming at least)... And the more modern the game/RT implem, the worst it is. RT is coming to Linux too when you see all the moves around vulkan ray tracing etc. I don't know if dlss will come to linux/dxvk etc too, I certainly hope so (and I suspect from leaks dlss 3.0 is near and will bring dlss to most games...), and then this will be a massive burial.
As such, unless you plan to change card in 1 year, you should not look at raster performance, but at more interesting RT, and nvidia utterly dominates here, a 400€ card is better than the 700€ card for AMD. Also, AMD MSRP is a total lie, and even when they are in stock, I don't expect to see any card at less than 100€ more than msrp or not before a very long time, making it not much of a sweet deal in the end. At least nvidia has founder editions to control the price.

RT won't be the standard until you have RT capable hardware in all your GPU tiers. Either way, we are on Linux and to the date you can only play two games on Linux with RT (AFAIK). And the DLSS situation is just worst (and lets keep away future "improvements" predictions). From a Linux gaming experience, you should definitely take a look on the raster performance as this are the only benchs you can get on our platform. In the end, DLSS and RT are gimmick features for Linux.

Quoting: 3zekielAlso, whether we like it or not (I don't but well), CUDA is here to stay too... And CUDA is Nvidia. Now, the experience is certainly better than opencl overall, so I'm not gonna blame anyone for staying on CUDA/Nvidia either. Just it is a pain in the ass to setup sometimes... That is smthg I'd love for Nvidia to open source more the framework so we can use/install it more easily.

As you implies, CUDA is just important for a minority of the gaming market, just like VR capabilities are.

Quoting: 3zekielRay tracing is coming, and it is to be expected that it will be ubiquitous real fast now.

But will it come before 2018 aka Wayland in production use? Oh, wait, it's already 2020! Using a 27' 4k screen, I already depend on it in production for fractional scaling.

Quoting: 3zekielAMD cards will become expensive open source paperweights before long

Until they do not offer acceleration in XWayland, NVidias cards are 'expensive closed source' paperweights for Games right NOW for me. Ofc, your situation can be different (so this is not to answer Kimyrielle's original question about there being any use, but rather to comment the fallacies in reply to it).

Even putting OSS ideals aside, what I see is NVidias driver stack more and more failing to enable a modern Linux desktop experience, not for being badly implemented, but for being at odds with the Linux model architecturally. Just look at the EGLStreams mess. If they want to address these problems, this would require NVidia to rewrite large parts of their driver in a way more compatible with Linux's model, and therefore lose the advatages they get from sharing large parts of the codebase with Windows.

They were the best on the market in the early 2010s, but AMD has integrated much better into the Linux ecosystem and is now offering the superior driver situation for general desktop use and Intel always had a good practice for Linux drivers and upstreaming graphics stuff. I'm looking forward to them joining the dGPU market.