Quite frankly I'm not into new and shiny games, so performance itself isn't a problem. And I use old 650Ti anyway. My main concern is if I'd have problems in running games at all.

While we're at it, how is Nouveau?

Oh, and I need hdmi-audio. AMD doesn't have a problem with that, does it?

Hmmm, where do I start. This will seem a rant but this is my experience to date.

To answer your Q's regards Nouveau and HDMI AMD audio.


Nouveau atm is useless due to no re clocking for NV cards on the Maxwell/pascal line . Not sure about earlier.

Hdmi audio works fine with both Radeon and AMDGPU kernel modules/driver

DP audio currently does not for AMDGPU .

Now the rant!


Recently switched from a 290x to a 1080fe.

I've had some serious annoying issues to just plain freezes with the 1080. To the point that if I hadn't of WB it and plumbed it in I would have reverted back to AMD on the oss stack/

2d desktop overall is just bad compared to the OSS driver, very noticable when youv'e used the oss driver for a good while

Now, If you plan on using FGLRX with AMD my advice is don't, The oss driver is far better 99.9% of the time

I could go into it further but I can't be bothered, Surficed to say, when AMD drops their next gen I'll switch.

I play on wine a bit, but it's just old games where performance is already top notch. Also, I have a 120Hz monitor, which I assume should work with amdgpu.

Now I need to decide whether I want to switch gpu vendor just because of the drivers since game performance isn't an issue.

Well, I tried migrating to nouveau and couldn't get X11 to start. Perhaps I should test more via liveCD, but given the status of open nvidia drivers, I have little hope I'll be content.

Check if Nouveau is blacklisted on your system, then I think you should create a config file, to tell Xorg to load the correct driver.
It less complicated than it sounds, check here for more info

Anyway with the Open Source drivers you won't get anywhere close to what the proprietary drivers provides you.
The performances are poor but no one is to blame for that, in fact the guys providing the drivers are doing a really good job by reverse-engineering from what Nvidia is offering.


Now to talk a bit about "AMD or Nvidia":
I'm an AMD user but I tried out some Nvidia cards too as I built many used PCs.

In my opinion you should buy Nvidia rather than AMD if you're interested only in native games, as it provides the best performances overall.
Another big plus for the green side is "Nvenc" if you like to capture videos of your gameplay.

On the red side you can either use the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO drivers or the open source Mesa.
I personally use Mesa where anyone can fully benefit and see what's the differences between closed and open source.
Some great external additions, such as the GALLIUM_HUD, Wine Gallium Nine, Gallium Nine CSMT.
All these works couldn't become a part of the main drivers if the latter was closed-source.
OpenGL4.5 is pretty close and the future is surely brighter for Vulkan in an open source environment.

Worth noticing that in many countries you can buy a GPU or any PC parts and send it back in 2 weeks or so.
So if you want to buy a new card you can give AMD a try and still be able to send it back and buy something else.

You can bet I was using Arch Wiki. ^_^
Anyway, I tried again and now it's working. Not sure what I did wrong the first time. Also desktop now "feels" it's actually 120Hz like it was supposed to be before. Probably placebo effect or some other settings are at play.

One thing to keep in mind when using Nouveau is that you actually need to manually reclock the card if you want to extract more gaming performance out of it. Considering you are on a GTX 650 Ti this shouldn't be too much of an issue, because I've heard they have pretty much perfectly working reclocking, as in, the card can reclock all the way to the highest clock speeds. It's still a minor inconvenience to have to run a command every time to do it, but it's not that bad. When I played around with Nouveau on my GTX 760 I could only get partial reclocking out of it (though I've heard the situation has improved since).

Currently I'm rocking an R7 370 with the AMD open source drivers and I have to say I'm quite impressed. The situation has been far more bug-free (Nouveau used to crash in spectacular ways with some games, that has apparently also improved) and automatic reclocking is there so I can trust the card to reclock for that extra bit of juice when I run a heavier task on it. The desktop experience is also as good as it was with Nouveau. Then there's of course Gallium Nine etc but I rarely need that functionality because I like to keep my gaming as native as possible. GALLIUM HUD is pretty fantastic though.

TL;DR: While Nouveau has improved quite drastically, the open source AMD drivers are miles ahead and improving much faster than Nouveau. Not all that surprising really, considering AMD actually backs the open drivers while Nvidia focuses on the blob.

Yeah, I wasn't impressed with the whole re-clocking manually issue. After re-clocking I still wasn't sure if I was running at max since performance was still lower. Which is why I'm back with proprietary drivers. My card is old anyway so future upgrade is imminent and it's gonna be AMD. Thanks to everyone for information regarding drivers.