7 ms·

In my experience nvidia has always been much easier to install than amd (fglrx).

xorcist 10y ago
That there even worse alternatives isn't helping. Avoid third party binary modules. Sure, they might work right now but you'll have no guarantees it'll work in the future. You also risk interactions with other subsystems (sleep etc.). It would be like Windows, where your printer might prevent you from upgrading your operating system. If you intend to run Linux on the thing, buy things that Linux supports out of the box. That probably means sticking to the working Intel stuff for now. You'll thank me later (or not, because you won't miss the problems you don't have).
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Go nvidia all the way. Ive got GT460 and it still gets up-to-date drivers (look how old that thing is!)
- oblio 10y ago
  While your theoretical point of view is solid, reality kind of disagrees with it. The binary blob provided by Nvidia have been quite reliable across the years (and I think they've been available for more than 10 years) while the open source ATI/AMD drivers have frequently failed to deliver.
  - Aeolos 10y ago
    Nvidia drivers do fail quite regularly, especially on laptops. Brightness control randomly stops working, suspend/resume is extremely unreliable, there are login issues on systems with both Intel and Nvidia graphics (supposedly solved with Mesa 12, which can only be found on Arch and Gentoo right now.) It's certainly not a panacea. In my experience, the open-source radeon drivers are significantly more stable. Fglrx was a stinking pile of crap that has officially been abandoned - the whole driver team has switched to the open-source drivers, now.
  - lmns 10y ago
    Quite reliable with Optimus? I'd bet your experience is based on desktop GPUs, but Optimus is painful with Linux.
    - Aeolos 10y ago
      Extremely so. My current (and only) working solution is to disable the Nvidia GPU on a host and use it PCIe passthrough to assign it to another Linux or Windows VM. That's the only stable solution that doesn't break the world when enabling/disabling the discrete GPU. We shouldn't have to revert to such extreme measures...
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        At the moment my only two issues with Optimus are that they crash X on wakeup if loaded, and that DPMS doesn't seem to disable properly after the screensaver ends. For the earlier you can add an a suspend hook to unload the nvidia modules, and for the latter you just need to switch to a tty and back to get the screen working again. Both are somewhat annoying, but far less than only being able to use it in a VM. That said, I'm curious about how you manage the VM output, considering that PCIe passthrough requires a dedicated screen.
        Aeolos 10y ago
        I normally run the GPU headless for machine learning. In the rare case I need to access the desktop shell of the VM, I just connect via Chrome Remote Desktop. In the even rarer case that I wish to play a game, I have an HDMI connection between the GPU and my projector, which I can enable with a remote control. Learning how to use qemu is a bit of a pain (hint: use qemu directly, virus is a huge waste of time) but after the initial learning curve the setup is seamless for my use case - and I feel safer without the GPU drivers having access to my normal desktop. I much prefer this setup to dual-booting Windows for gaming. The VM spins up in a few seconds and shuts down when not in use (turning off the GPU in the process).
  - lqdc13 10y ago
    Binary blobs provided by Nvidia are extremely unreliable. I've had to ssh to a machine because the graphics don't work at all after some kernel upgrades. Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare. Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux. The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers. If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.
deleted 10y ago
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Nullabillity 10y ago
Not anymore, these days radeon is far better than fglrx and works great straight out of the box.
- Shorel 10y ago
  For what GPUs? This is an honest question, and I appreciate your answer in advance. I have a desktop with an HD 6850 and the radeon driver has always worked well, I used to play DOTA2 on it. But this is a very old GPU now, and all newer models (HD7xxx and up) were having performance issues with the radeon driver last time I was reading the forums.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    R9 270X in my case. The Rx 3xx and newer (and they're slowly porting it to older devices) use the newer AMDGPU driver stack, which is supposed to be even better, but I haven't tried that myself yet.

That there even worse alternatives isn't helping. Avoid third party binary modules. Sure, they might work right now but you'll have no guarantees it'll work in the future. You also risk interactions with other subsystems (sleep etc.). It would be like Windows, where your printer might prevent you from upgrading your operating system. If you intend to run Linux on the thing, buy things that Linux supports out of the box. That probably means sticking to the working Intel stuff for now. You'll thank me later (or not, because you won't miss the problems you don't have).

emp_zealoth 10y ago
Go nvidia all the way. Ive got GT460 and it still gets up-to-date drivers (look how old that thing is!)
oblio 10y ago
While your theoretical point of view is solid, reality kind of disagrees with it. The binary blob provided by Nvidia have been quite reliable across the years (and I think they've been available for more than 10 years) while the open source ATI/AMD drivers have frequently failed to deliver.
- Aeolos 10y ago
  Nvidia drivers do fail quite regularly, especially on laptops. Brightness control randomly stops working, suspend/resume is extremely unreliable, there are login issues on systems with both Intel and Nvidia graphics (supposedly solved with Mesa 12, which can only be found on Arch and Gentoo right now.) It's certainly not a panacea. In my experience, the open-source radeon drivers are significantly more stable. Fglrx was a stinking pile of crap that has officially been abandoned - the whole driver team has switched to the open-source drivers, now.
- lmns 10y ago
  Quite reliable with Optimus? I'd bet your experience is based on desktop GPUs, but Optimus is painful with Linux.
  - Aeolos 10y ago
    Extremely so. My current (and only) working solution is to disable the Nvidia GPU on a host and use it PCIe passthrough to assign it to another Linux or Windows VM. That's the only stable solution that doesn't break the world when enabling/disabling the discrete GPU. We shouldn't have to revert to such extreme measures...
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      At the moment my only two issues with Optimus are that they crash X on wakeup if loaded, and that DPMS doesn't seem to disable properly after the screensaver ends. For the earlier you can add an a suspend hook to unload the nvidia modules, and for the latter you just need to switch to a tty and back to get the screen working again. Both are somewhat annoying, but far less than only being able to use it in a VM. That said, I'm curious about how you manage the VM output, considering that PCIe passthrough requires a dedicated screen.
      - Aeolos 10y ago
        I normally run the GPU headless for machine learning. In the rare case I need to access the desktop shell of the VM, I just connect via Chrome Remote Desktop. In the even rarer case that I wish to play a game, I have an HDMI connection between the GPU and my projector, which I can enable with a remote control. Learning how to use qemu is a bit of a pain (hint: use qemu directly, virus is a huge waste of time) but after the initial learning curve the setup is seamless for my use case - and I feel safer without the GPU drivers having access to my normal desktop. I much prefer this setup to dual-booting Windows for gaming. The VM spins up in a few seconds and shuts down when not in use (turning off the GPU in the process).
- lqdc13 10y ago
  Binary blobs provided by Nvidia are extremely unreliable. I've had to ssh to a machine because the graphics don't work at all after some kernel upgrades. Linking to Theano-CUDA is always a nightmare. Forget about optimus. That has never worked correctly on Linux. The only reason I can see someone wanting nvidia on linux is for CUDA. And in that case, you can't just use the ubuntu pre-built version of the drivers. If you are not doing neural nets locally on Linux, you shouldn't get a discrete graphics card. And if you do get a discrete one, make sure it's not Nvidia since their open source drivers are much inferior to AMD's.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Nullabillity 10y ago

Not anymore, these days radeon is far better than fglrx and works great straight out of the box.

Shorel 10y ago
For what GPUs? This is an honest question, and I appreciate your answer in advance. I have a desktop with an HD 6850 and the radeon driver has always worked well, I used to play DOTA2 on it. But this is a very old GPU now, and all newer models (HD7xxx and up) were having performance issues with the radeon driver last time I was reading the forums.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  R9 270X in my case. The Rx 3xx and newer (and they're slowly porting it to older devices) use the newer AMDGPU driver stack, which is supposed to be even better, but I haven't tried that myself yet.