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AMD is finally approaching parity in the past year or two, but Nvidia is still ahead in terms of day-to-day usability. It sucks that they're closed, but if you

AMD is finally approaching parity in the past year or two, but Nvidia is still ahead in terms of day-to-day usability. It sucks that they're closed, but if you just want to install a driver and have your system work, Nvidia is ahead. Look at this mess: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD Do you want AMDGPU, AMDGPU PRO, ATI, or Catalyst? How do you choose? Let's assume you want open source and recent, so probably AMDGPU. OK that's relatively straightforward, but now let's say you want Vulkan support. That's over here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vulkan#Installation https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Vulkan#Installation and golly wouldn't you know it there are three choices, vulkan-radeon, amdvlk, and vulkan-amdgpu-pro. How do those relate to the radeon and amdgpu drivers mentioned earlier? Arrrrrrrrrrgh. Meanwhile on nvidia, you install "nvidia" and you're done. I've been working in gaming on Linux profesionally for ten years. If I were buying a new GPU today, I would pick nvidia.

selectodude 7y ago
Also their OpenGL performance is abysmal. On windows isn’t not the biggest deal since everything is DX but on Linux?
- Qub3d 7y ago
  ...Vulkan? Proton? In terms of 3D acceleration libraries and support, its never been better on linux. I actually just switched to manjaro full-time because everything I wanted to play now works on linux, too.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  This was an issue with the previous proprietary drivers, but the modern open source ones just use Mesa like everything else sane.
- garaetjjte 7y ago
  Mesa drivers are fine. The one with horrid performance is their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO, but there's no reason to use it. (especially since Mesa now support GL compatibility profile)
  - Crinus 7y ago
    Mesa drivers are far from fine, they only got rid of the "core only" braindead schism just last year (IIRC) and that was thanks to pressure from AMD to get games working. Even then a lot of Mesa's codepaths are downright awful. Nvidia had OpenGL as a major focus for decades (it was even the first API to get new features introduced in their hardware via extensions - though nowadays they also seem to do the same with Vulkan) and their OpenGL implementation's quality shows.
    - garaetjjte 7y ago
      Yes, Mesa is not perfect. (particularly annoying thing is that it is possible to lock up entire GPU by invalid memory accesses in shader, infinite loops not always recover cleanly and lock up GPU too, and these bugs are accessible through WebGL, etc.) But I prefer occasional crash in badly behaved software than abysmal performance of their proprietary implementation. (and it crashes too, usually on software using legacy pre-GL3 context). And as to compatibility context, IMO OpenGL shouldn't have defined it at all. It is rather weird to have rendering code using both legacy fixed pipeline and modern shaders. From my experience it just causes problems everywhere, and I had encountered unexpectedly bad performance and glitches on Nvidia drivers too. (though maybe less often than on Intel/AMD)
onli 7y ago
I think you might be blinded by prior experiences (yes, that sounds illogical). The choice you have with AMD now is not bad for users, they get a working good and free driver with their distro out of the box. And people like you, who work in gaming under Linux and might use a more custom distro, can figure out which one is the best driver in your specific situation (it's AMDGPU always anyway). I'd never buy a Nvidia card for Linux now. I wouldn't have done so three years ago, but now? That'd be a huge step backwards.
- coldpie 7y ago
  It's possible. The last time I bought an AMD GPU for my personal use was in 2009 or 2010. But I really do work with this stuff every day. In our QA lab, the AMD machines have far more problems than the Nvidia machines do. Valve's VR software works much less consistently; installing modern versions of the drivers on Ubuntu is a huge pain, you have to use 3rd party repos maintained by some random guy; missing features and driver bugs are much more common on AMD (though not unheard of on Nvidia either). AMD is definitely getting better, and being open source is an enormous point in its favor, but it's still just less usable day-to-day for an end user. I hope this changes.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Unfortunately very few Linux people even see a point in actually using their GPU. As long as it can composite terminal emulators, they think everything is great. I've seen such reasoning in discussions about sway, where people are encouraged to throw out their $500+ GPU in favor of the on-die Intel GPU...
    - onli 7y ago
      To be clear, I'm a gamer. The games I play would not run with Intel onboard gpus. And I'm very happy with the performance the AMD driver delivers.
vetinari 7y ago
> Look at this mess: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD Do you want AMDGPU, AMDGPU PRO, ATI, or Catalyst? How do you choose? You don't. Just use what your distribution uses for you. That's one less step, than > you install "nvidia" > If I were buying a new GPU today, I would pick nvidia. I guess you don't mind the problem Nvidia has with Wayland.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > I guess you don't mind the problem Nvidia has with Wayland. From my perspective of someone who dislikes Wayland, that is a feature of Nvidia's drivers :-P.
corey_moncure 7y ago
My experience with NV on Linux is out of date, from 2003-ish (?) when the binary driver was new, to 2010, but I remember a few drawbacks I couldn't overcome and happily made the switch to ATI/AMD: 1) Closed driver 2) Weird incompatible multimonitor support called twinview? Where windows would maximize to stretch across all your screens 3) Abusive on the PCI subsystem, so that my sound hardware would experience underruns, both spurious and reproducible events such as during workspace switches 4) Lockups 5) Corruption/lockups switching between FB terminals and the X terminal I switched to ATI and the open source driver and all these problems went away.
bwat49 7y ago
> but if you just want to install a driver and have your system work, Nvidia is ahead. But if you want your driver to not break horribly whenever there's a xorg or kernel update, nvidia is behind Or if you want your driver to just work 'out of the box' without needing to go out and install a binary driver nvidia is behind Or if you want your driver to support newer technologies like DRI3 and wayland nvidia is behind

selectodude 7y ago

Also their OpenGL performance is abysmal. On windows isn’t not the biggest deal since everything is DX but on Linux?

Qub3d 7y ago
...Vulkan? Proton? In terms of 3D acceleration libraries and support, its never been better on linux. I actually just switched to manjaro full-time because everything I wanted to play now works on linux, too.
throwaway2048 7y ago
This was an issue with the previous proprietary drivers, but the modern open source ones just use Mesa like everything else sane.
garaetjjte 7y ago
Mesa drivers are fine. The one with horrid performance is their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO, but there's no reason to use it. (especially since Mesa now support GL compatibility profile)
- Crinus 7y ago
  Mesa drivers are far from fine, they only got rid of the "core only" braindead schism just last year (IIRC) and that was thanks to pressure from AMD to get games working. Even then a lot of Mesa's codepaths are downright awful. Nvidia had OpenGL as a major focus for decades (it was even the first API to get new features introduced in their hardware via extensions - though nowadays they also seem to do the same with Vulkan) and their OpenGL implementation's quality shows.
  - garaetjjte 7y ago
    Yes, Mesa is not perfect. (particularly annoying thing is that it is possible to lock up entire GPU by invalid memory accesses in shader, infinite loops not always recover cleanly and lock up GPU too, and these bugs are accessible through WebGL, etc.) But I prefer occasional crash in badly behaved software than abysmal performance of their proprietary implementation. (and it crashes too, usually on software using legacy pre-GL3 context). And as to compatibility context, IMO OpenGL shouldn't have defined it at all. It is rather weird to have rendering code using both legacy fixed pipeline and modern shaders. From my experience it just causes problems everywhere, and I had encountered unexpectedly bad performance and glitches on Nvidia drivers too. (though maybe less often than on Intel/AMD)

onli 7y ago

I think you might be blinded by prior experiences (yes, that sounds illogical). The choice you have with AMD now is not bad for users, they get a working good and free driver with their distro out of the box. And people like you, who work in gaming under Linux and might use a more custom distro, can figure out which one is the best driver in your specific situation (it's AMDGPU always anyway). I'd never buy a Nvidia card for Linux now. I wouldn't have done so three years ago, but now? That'd be a huge step backwards.

coldpie 7y ago
It's possible. The last time I bought an AMD GPU for my personal use was in 2009 or 2010. But I really do work with this stuff every day. In our QA lab, the AMD machines have far more problems than the Nvidia machines do. Valve's VR software works much less consistently; installing modern versions of the drivers on Ubuntu is a huge pain, you have to use 3rd party repos maintained by some random guy; missing features and driver bugs are much more common on AMD (though not unheard of on Nvidia either). AMD is definitely getting better, and being open source is an enormous point in its favor, but it's still just less usable day-to-day for an end user. I hope this changes.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Unfortunately very few Linux people even see a point in actually using their GPU. As long as it can composite terminal emulators, they think everything is great. I've seen such reasoning in discussions about sway, where people are encouraged to throw out their $500+ GPU in favor of the on-die Intel GPU...
  - onli 7y ago
    To be clear, I'm a gamer. The games I play would not run with Intel onboard gpus. And I'm very happy with the performance the AMD driver delivers.

vetinari 7y ago

> Look at this mess: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD Do you want AMDGPU, AMDGPU PRO, ATI, or Catalyst? How do you choose? You don't. Just use what your distribution uses for you. That's one less step, than > you install "nvidia" > If I were buying a new GPU today, I would pick nvidia. I guess you don't mind the problem Nvidia has with Wayland.

Crinus 7y ago
> I guess you don't mind the problem Nvidia has with Wayland. From my perspective of someone who dislikes Wayland, that is a feature of Nvidia's drivers :-P.

corey_moncure 7y ago

My experience with NV on Linux is out of date, from 2003-ish (?) when the binary driver was new, to 2010, but I remember a few drawbacks I couldn't overcome and happily made the switch to ATI/AMD: 1) Closed driver 2) Weird incompatible multimonitor support called twinview? Where windows would maximize to stretch across all your screens 3) Abusive on the PCI subsystem, so that my sound hardware would experience underruns, both spurious and reproducible events such as during workspace switches 4) Lockups 5) Corruption/lockups switching between FB terminals and the X terminal I switched to ATI and the open source driver and all these problems went away.

bwat49 7y ago

> but if you just want to install a driver and have your system work, Nvidia is ahead. But if you want your driver to not break horribly whenever there's a xorg or kernel update, nvidia is behind Or if you want your driver to just work 'out of the box' without needing to go out and install a binary driver nvidia is behind Or if you want your driver to support newer technologies like DRI3 and wayland nvidia is behind