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Is there a generally accepted "best" manufacturer for Linux cards? I keep reading to avoid Nvidia, I'm not quite sure what to get though.

baobrien 9y ago
AMD's open source drivers on recent are pretty solid, AFAIK, and the proprietary ones don't suck.
- baldfat 9y ago
  AMD had released the most documentation and yet the community loves to pile on AMD. I think there is no company that could have done better than what they did in 2014 Linux Driver announcement https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_cata...
- Spivak 9y ago
  But it has to be recent. If the card you're looking at runs the radeon driver then run for the hills.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  AMD also has the ROCm commitment going on. All the ROCm drivers are fully open source on GitHub. ROCm doesn't have display drivers, but the compute-drivers are more important for well... compute tasks. (You'll probably be doing development on another machine, transfer code to the ROCm server box and then execute it through SSH or something). So forward looking, one can reasonably expect that AMD's Open Source drivers will be superior. But this only applies to RX 4xx series and newer, and not even to all those cards. (Some cards like RX 550 just don't work right now, despite claimed support on marketing pages).
angry_octet 9y ago
I'm, buy NVIDIA, they are the best? You can run cuda on them and not anything else? Don't buy NVIDIA if you don't care about performance of OpenGL/etc.
rspeer 9y ago
Given the context of the thread is machine learning, you can't avoid Nvidia. CUDA is an Nvidia technology. They have ML cornered right now.
- reilly3000 9y ago
  There needs to be more voices demanding TF fully support opencl
  - rspeer 9y ago
    There need to be more hardware companies putting any effort into ML. (Besides, say, Alphabet, which seems to be acting as a hardware company whose only customer is themselves.) Intel has indicated that they're working on it, and that's who I'm hoping for right now. If Intel came up with on-chip ML operations that are fast enough and made them work with, say, TensorFlow and PyTorch, I think that researchers would abandon Nvidia pretty much instantly. I've never had to worry about my "Intel driver" breaking.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Intel's drivers are open source and they support wayland. Unfortunately, their GPUs aren't very powerful so it's a poor fit for ML.
angry_octet 9y ago
Despite the AMD fanboys being angry with me, I'll say it again: - nVidia cards work excellently on Linux, - they are the only choice for serious graphics, GPGPU and ML professionals - the driver problems are overblown. In comparison to the world AMD has caused me over the years they are angelic.

baobrien 9y ago

AMD's open source drivers on recent are pretty solid, AFAIK, and the proprietary ones don't suck.

baldfat 9y ago
AMD had released the most documentation and yet the community loves to pile on AMD. I think there is no company that could have done better than what they did in 2014 Linux Driver announcement https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_cata...
Spivak 9y ago
But it has to be recent. If the card you're looking at runs the radeon driver then run for the hills.
dragontamer 9y ago
AMD also has the ROCm commitment going on. All the ROCm drivers are fully open source on GitHub. ROCm doesn't have display drivers, but the compute-drivers are more important for well... compute tasks. (You'll probably be doing development on another machine, transfer code to the ROCm server box and then execute it through SSH or something). So forward looking, one can reasonably expect that AMD's Open Source drivers will be superior. But this only applies to RX 4xx series and newer, and not even to all those cards. (Some cards like RX 550 just don't work right now, despite claimed support on marketing pages).

angry_octet 9y ago

I'm, buy NVIDIA, they are the best? You can run cuda on them and not anything else? Don't buy NVIDIA if you don't care about performance of OpenGL/etc.

rspeer 9y ago

Given the context of the thread is machine learning, you can't avoid Nvidia. CUDA is an Nvidia technology. They have ML cornered right now.

reilly3000 9y ago
There needs to be more voices demanding TF fully support opencl
- rspeer 9y ago
  There need to be more hardware companies putting any effort into ML. (Besides, say, Alphabet, which seems to be acting as a hardware company whose only customer is themselves.) Intel has indicated that they're working on it, and that's who I'm hoping for right now. If Intel came up with on-chip ML operations that are fast enough and made them work with, say, TensorFlow and PyTorch, I think that researchers would abandon Nvidia pretty much instantly. I've never had to worry about my "Intel driver" breaking.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Intel's drivers are open source and they support wayland. Unfortunately, their GPUs aren't very powerful so it's a poor fit for ML.

angry_octet 9y ago

Despite the AMD fanboys being angry with me, I'll say it again: - nVidia cards work excellently on Linux, - they are the only choice for serious graphics, GPGPU and ML professionals - the driver problems are overblown. In comparison to the world AMD has caused me over the years they are angelic.