My recommendation for the thread opener if only looking at performance would be to save money and wait until mid/end of 2019. By the end of 2019 we should have the next gens from Nvidia and AMD.

In terms of gmaing performance I would rate the Nvidia driver still better than anything for AMD.

Also power consumption should be in general lower with Nvidia.

As Nvidia is used in many professional linux based environments Nvidia has a very good motivation to continue delivering well performing Linux drivers. They actually really make money with it.

I'm still wondering why AMD can't transform it to an software advantage, that they are the standard for Mac GFX workstations.

The only reason I can think of switching to AMD now (besides Ether/Monero Mining where Vega is superior) would be that for some reason my system drivers should be as much FOSS as possible.

At least I'm waiting until 2019 to replace my 1070. But yes, because of the recent developments AMD could be my primary choice just for driver/supporting Linux community reasons. At least if the support stays on this level or gets even better.

QuoteThe simple answer is DON'T! AMD sucks.

View video on youtube.com


Swapped a GTX 1080 for a rx64 due to issues, you are just talking complete shit tbh

Used antergos mid last year on a old athlon xp3200 system with a 4870 in it, Worked out of the box no issues! thats a 10+ year old card for a start.

Anything earlier than that isn't really AMD's fault as they didn't buy ATI until mid 2006

Quoting: GuestThe simple answer is DON'T! AMD sucks. While lots of debate on how far the FOSS drivers have come AMD leaves their products to die WAY too fast. I can install a 15 year old nVidia card in a machine and install the open source or nVidia made drivers with ease. With AMD there are no drivers unless you use a super old distro or the FOSS drivers that do not give you the bells and whistles you want from a high end GPU. I've used AMD for nearly 20 years. I remember when the ATI cards with 8mb of RAM where this amazing thing replacing all the voodoo cards. Now...I won't touch AMD/ATI/Radeon again unless they drastically change their attitude towards legacy products (which they seem to think is anything more than a month old) and simply keeping things up with new kernel/distro releases in general.

More so there is nothing really better than a 1080. You will have to wait a number of years before anything will "feel" like an upgrade. Most you will see is some lame 2-15 FPS boosts here and there. Completely not worth the money, unless you're rich. Though you might be rich if you can afford to replace a 1080 "just because."

You are rich enough if you can buy a 1080 in your computer in my opinion. BTW, AMD still supports the APU in my laptop, which cannot be a newer branch than from 2011-12, and it still happily runs games as well as a reasonably modern distro, so you are clearly wrong on that point.

What are the bells and whistles you are missing?

Quoting: GuestPS : this is crazy to see an Intel HD Graphics is absolutely constantly butter smooth under KDE and not a several €/$ worth Nvidia GPU :)

This was one of my main reasons to jump AMD(had a gtx1080) as their desktop experience is plain shocking, and to be frank gaming want much better regards bugs/issues. Certainly a far cry from the "Nvidia work perfect under linux" BS touted about

Quoting: GuestI created a distinct thread when looking for a low/medium end AMD GPU to replace my 1060, in the prospect of gaming a little but having a better desktop experience. (suboptimal with nvidia under KDE contrary to Intel HD).
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3183/page=1#r14368

I had a couple of interesting replies but someone told me KDE/Kwin/Plasma (not games) are not smoother with an AMD card compared to an NVIDIA one. I was hoping to get a desktop as smooth as with the Intel HD chipsets (but with lower performance in games). Anyone to confirm / infirm this ? Even though games are usually stellar with the 1060, I'm frustrated with the desktop performance (not constantly smooth, tweaks needed, not completely stable when using some of those tweaks)

I can't confirm/infirm the smoothness issue - I didn't seem to have problems there. However, KDE was still crashing for me regardless, so I didn't get a more stable experience. (I tried KDE 5.12 like two weeks ago).

So I'm back to GNOME on Wayland for gaming, and XFCE on Xorg for VR.

Well it seemed like half of the desktop was crashing at random points in time, like panels, window decorations, applications. SteamVR also was really unstable and crashing every two minutes.

Nah, I don't think it was compositing-related. But yeah, for me Gnome is stable on that same PC. I'm not sure if I changed any KDE settings that may have been causing issues, but I know NuSuey also had problems with his AMD card under KDE.

I'll admit I haven't been following this thread, but I am a AMD user (Vega 56) using KDE and I seem to have less issues than many other people on gnome and other DEs.

I think the main thing is what distro you use as you'll need to have KDE, mesa and the kernel as up to date as possible for a good experience :)

Perfectly smooth.

I have had kwin crash while starting a game which is very rare, but easily fixed with "kwin_x11 --replace"
My compositor settings:

I gave KDE neon a go before going for Manjaro. Very different experience for me as I found KDE Neon to be lacking. Really can't imagine using that distro as a daily driver :)