Arch... 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.

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) ?

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

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.

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.

because amd dont have anything similar than nvenc (cuda 11 + nvenc 10)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#VA-API_drivers

because 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

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

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.

. 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.

the what?... i run multiple kernels with nvidia, nvidia-dkms takes care of building the modules for every kernel, i dont need to do anything special myself. but its true that sometimes rc kernels don't work with nvidia, specially if you are using their stable drivers.

Nvidia dkms clearly has limits on what kernels it supports, that's not even a question. It's not uncommon for it not to support newest kernels until Nvidia pushes an update. That's the nature of dkms. The kernel doesn't guarantee any stable ABI. Same applies to any dkms usage, not just for Nvidia.

Last edited by Shmerl on 10 August 2020 at 3:40 pm UTC

But in general you have no reason to use the latest kernels when you’re using nvidia *because* the driver is not in the kernel :).

Yeah personally use stable kernel and driver works ok as youre said with nvidia propietary driver

But in general you have no reason to use the latest kernels when you’re using nvidia *because* the driver is not in the kernel :).

Whatever the reason to use newest kernel can be completely unrelated to Nvidia. It's not all about the GPU.

Last edited by Shmerl on 10 August 2020 at 9:12 pm UTC

The 5.8 kernel resolves energy issues with AMD Zen processors, add some new hardware support...

I have passed from Nvidia to AMD recently and in my own experience, i think there are some little issues with Mesa drivers, but this can be resolved with some tricks. If i had issues with propietary nvidia drivers it is more difficult to resolve.

AMD open-source drivers are very good. But the main issue is hardware accelerated renders in some applications like DaVinciResolve. Nvidia is better at this point. And OpenCL implementation is outdated (1.2 despite the last and speedy 2.0).