8 ms·

Interesting. I’ve not used Linux as my mainly driver for years. I miss it and I want to come back but I basically don’t have any decent PC anymore so I have the

by pjerem 5y ago

Interesting. I’ve not used Linux as my mainly driver for years. I miss it and I want to come back but I basically don’t have any decent PC anymore so I have the freedom to get/build one. When I used it, ironically, NVidia was the way to go on Linux and ATI/AMD was a shit show. Is AMD ok nowadays ? My needs are mostly confortable casual gaming where I don’t care having more than 60fps and I don’t play online (so this anti cheats situation doesn’t really bother me other than ideological issues).

modeless 5y ago
Despite my complaints, for casual gaming on a desktop you shouldn't have too many issues with Nvidia's drivers these days as long as you can use the ones packaged by your distro instead of Nvidia's installer. My troubles have mostly been associated with laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics, or desktops used for ML training where the distro-packaged drivers wouldn't work for one reason or another. I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML. They are OK but with some caveats like VP9 HW decode not being available in Linux AMD iGPU drivers for reasons, which won't be a problem if you're running an AMD desktop tower PC, but if you're gonna watch Youtube on your AMD laptop, your battery will take a hit along with possible extra fan noise, which is unacceptable for a great media content consumption experience in Linux when even no-name Android phones and tablets have VP9 HW decode in Youtube out of the box. No bueno. This is such a mess, as VP9 & AV1 HW video decode is not an issue under linux for Intel iGPUs, but AMD seems to not give a shit to expose VP9 decode on linux for their iGPUs. Also, unlike with Intel iGPUs, under linux, radeon-top does not show GPU decode usage for easy diagnostic purposes. I assume it's because AMD bought the video codec engine IP from some third party fabless IP vendor and they don't have the permission to open source the drivers for the video engine block as part of the licensing agreement, like they do for their in house developed GPU block. But still, regardless of the reason, it sucks for the linux end-users. And another important issue nobody seems to talk about but one should be aware of, AMD APUs (at least to 5000 series) don't have unified memory between CPU and iGPU like Intel and Apple do, so you have to configure in your laptop BIOS how much of your system RAM you want allocated to your iGPU (512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB), with the rest remaining for the CPU. This sucks big time if you're switching between productivity where you need more memory for applications, and playing video games where you need as much memory as possible for the GPU, so you need to keep rebooting and changing in the BIOS the amount of memory you allocate to your iGPU, vs on Intel chips where the whole system memory is unified and shared dynamically between the CPU and iGPU, and it boils my blood as the whole marketing gimmick of AMD's APUs was the seamless merger between CPU and GPU resources together, while in practice their (5000 series) APUs are just a Ryzen CPU with a Vega GPU glued on the same die without them actually sharing any of the resources properly. Maybe the new 6000 series with RDNA2 changed that but I couldn't find any detailed info. Honestly, as a laptop owner with AMD APU, if you're planning to go Linux, just get one with an Intel chip instead. Much less head aches as Intel Linux drivers and apps are second to none and have a unified memory model. The performance and efficiency of AMD APUs is still great though, especially under Windows, but the overall implementation as a whole package seems poorly thought out and rushed out the door, especially under Linux compared to Intel.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Isn't this some distro-specific problem? VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). VP9 is not supported in hardware on UVD-based GPUs (i.e. discrete Vega). VCN 3.0-based GPUs (i.e. RDNA2, the 6000-series APUs) also support AV1 decoding.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). Yeah, in theory it's available, but good luck actually getting your browser to use it to HW decode YouTube videos under linux out of the box. It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers. There are endless threads online about this not working. I for one, never managed to get it to work in any browser. What a mess.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        > It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers. Chrome doesn't support VA-API, so do not bother trying. Some distributions do have Chromium builds with VA-API support enabled, but YMMV. Chromium uses X11 only and libva requires dri2, so it doesn't work under XWayland, which supports only dri3. (=> Chromium with VA-API works only in native X11 session) Firefox does support VA-API. There was a period of time, when it did only under Wayland, but nowadays both X11 and Wayland should work. When running under Wayland, use the native version and /not/ via XWayland, because the same thing as with Chromium applies.
        mrkstu 5y ago
        The above is a fair summation of Linux's failure as a desktop in a single post.
        vetinari 5y ago
        Maybe it is, but keep in mind, that Chrome is a proprietary application - the Linux community and the desktop communities have exactly zero input, what will and what will be not supported. On the Firefox side, Redhat and Suse people did the work to support video acceleration.
jrockway 5y ago
I never had any problems with the NVidia driver either, and I can't see how it would prevent the system from booting. (I mean, it's not linked with the kernel and not set to load the module until X starts, so you can get to a single user mode console or SSH in if X breaks. Maybe people think X and booting are the same thing?) The only complaint I had with NVidia was that a long time ago I had one of the first consumer-grade 4k displays, and it exposed itself as 2 1920x2160 displays. That all worked ... "great". X thought the monitor was two displays, and so anything that cares about the calculation of display boundaries (say, full screen video), didn't work correctly; it would just show on half the monitor. One day I found that a config parsing bug could cause the xrandr extension to be disabled while keeping everything else working, and then full screen worked. (The options to just lie to xrandr or disable it were of course broken, which is why bugs interacting with bugs was the fix. They never fixed the bugs or the bugged bugs, so shrug I guess.) It took me months of pulling out my hair to find that workaround, and having used X since before xrandr was invented it drove me crazy. In a past life, I also pulled out all my hair to get xrandr to work. It never fucking worked. And then the one time you don't want it to work, it works and can't be made not to work. Argh!!! Just send me back to 2000 please! (Since then I've switched to Windows, and I still have that monitor. It works perfectly under Windows. You wouldn't even know that it uses the hacky Displayport MST stuff. Probably have a nice hack hard-coded right into the driver, and if it doesn't activate for some reason, you're completely screwed.)
- smegger001 5y ago
  Your right I suspect as I have had this problem myself; it is boot-able, but it will break the Xserver in such away that it can't even change to text only terminal to fix it. So I have to go into single user mode uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver then reboot, and it magically works again. I think it is the installer breaking if there is a old copy installed already rather than a bug in the actual driver itself. This happens every 3-4 months on my Ubuntu gaming laptop.
pizza234 5y ago
I've had a few Nvidia cards (from 9xx to 20xx) and one (very modern) AMD. The AMD drivers runs fine. They're functionally inferior to the Nvidia ones (in several aspects), but I had no big problems. I don't play on Linux, though. I think open source makes a significant the difference - with Nvidia, issues often can't be solved by software devs (e.g. Libreoffice Calc running updating the screen very slowly). I suppose that with open source drivers, devs can at least get an idea of what's going on. However, there's one dealbreaker with Nvidia - they have such "blob of a cards", that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau) can't run at all with many Nvidia card series. I couldn't even boot with a GT 1030 (among the others). I actually have no idea how people can install Linux on Nvidia systems, since I had to create an adhoc iso with the binary drivers preinstalled.
- josefx 5y ago
  > that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau) To this day I cannot think of a good reason to ship nouveau outside of "lets make users with nvidia cards suffer". I get the idea behind the nouveau project, but pushing an experimental driver that cannot work with 99% of the hardware it latches onto and forces users to disable it if they want a basic working system is actively malicious.
  - gryn 5y ago
    I don't know the last time you used nouveau drivers but this is just wrong. is it feature complete ? no, but to go ahead and say it's not working for 99% is just lying here is the list: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html what you can say though is that it is a bad idea for GPU that are relatively recent. wont block you from booting or displaying to screen but would probably be slow. also this is distro dependent, I remember being given the choice with no default one (mean chosen automatically) when installing Manjaro (a derivative of arch linux). I chose the proprietary driver since they are feature complete but later switched to nouveau driver since they are not prone to breaking on every other update. that was 2 years ago, zero problems since.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Yes, AMD is fine. Intel works well if you get a computer with an iGPU, but the last time I looked, AMD's iGPUs were a bit more powerful. You'll want a Nvidia card for ML, unfortunately.
orwin 5y ago
Amd after their island cards just works.
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I have built my desktop with top end components: ASRock X570M Pro4, ASUS ROG Radeon RX 6800, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, WDBlack Nvme, and I have no issue at all with drivers or anything (I also use gentoo with a self-configured kernel, no genkernel). It's my daily driver for working and gaming 4k (with 3 4k monitors) Linux has no issue with drivers and/or video cards in particular, people just need to pay some attention when buying components, saying that linux has issues with graphics because of nvidia it's a bit unfair, nouveau is not able to use acceleration because the videocard doesn't activate it if it isn't loaded by the official nvidia blob, so if linux is supposed to have issues with graphic card while vendors actively create obstacles, we will never figure the real issue and hold the right people accountable: It's nvidia that has still issues with linux
- NavinF 5y ago
  That works if you don’t care about deep learning or use any apps that need CUDA
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    Yeah but why do we blame linux if it's the official nvidia drivers that sucks and when the video cards doesn't work with acceleration if you don't use that driver that sucks? What is linux supposed to do?
    - NavinF 5y ago
      I don’t care who’s to blame, but I’ll just say that the proprietary drivers work just fine on servers and I imagine they’d work fine on Desktop too if distros installed them automatically. Loads of people try Linux on a PC they already have instead of buying a new one that has upstream drivers for every component. This is yet another reason why Linux desktop will never have >2% market share.
mastax 5y ago
The AMD drivers are pretty good, at least a year after the cards are released. AMD has only just started doing the Intel thing of pushing driver support for GPUs before they are released so you often need to run bleeding edge kernel/Mesa or wait a while to get good support.

by pjerem 5y ago

modeless 5y ago

Despite my complaints, for casual gaming on a desktop you shouldn't have too many issues with Nvidia's drivers these days as long as you can use the ones packaged by your distro instead of Nvidia's installer. My troubles have mostly been associated with laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics, or desktops used for ML training where the distro-packaged drivers wouldn't work for one reason or another. I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>I've heard AMD's drivers are OK these days but haven't tried them myself because I care about ML. They are OK but with some caveats like VP9 HW decode not being available in Linux AMD iGPU drivers for reasons, which won't be a problem if you're running an AMD desktop tower PC, but if you're gonna watch Youtube on your AMD laptop, your battery will take a hit along with possible extra fan noise, which is unacceptable for a great media content consumption experience in Linux when even no-name Android phones and tablets have VP9 HW decode in Youtube out of the box. No bueno. This is such a mess, as VP9 & AV1 HW video decode is not an issue under linux for Intel iGPUs, but AMD seems to not give a shit to expose VP9 decode on linux for their iGPUs. Also, unlike with Intel iGPUs, under linux, radeon-top does not show GPU decode usage for easy diagnostic purposes. I assume it's because AMD bought the video codec engine IP from some third party fabless IP vendor and they don't have the permission to open source the drivers for the video engine block as part of the licensing agreement, like they do for their in house developed GPU block. But still, regardless of the reason, it sucks for the linux end-users. And another important issue nobody seems to talk about but one should be aware of, AMD APUs (at least to 5000 series) don't have unified memory between CPU and iGPU like Intel and Apple do, so you have to configure in your laptop BIOS how much of your system RAM you want allocated to your iGPU (512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB), with the rest remaining for the CPU. This sucks big time if you're switching between productivity where you need more memory for applications, and playing video games where you need as much memory as possible for the GPU, so you need to keep rebooting and changing in the BIOS the amount of memory you allocate to your iGPU, vs on Intel chips where the whole system memory is unified and shared dynamically between the CPU and iGPU, and it boils my blood as the whole marketing gimmick of AMD's APUs was the seamless merger between CPU and GPU resources together, while in practice their (5000 series) APUs are just a Ryzen CPU with a Vega GPU glued on the same die without them actually sharing any of the resources properly. Maybe the new 6000 series with RDNA2 changed that but I couldn't find any detailed info. Honestly, as a laptop owner with AMD APU, if you're planning to go Linux, just get one with an Intel chip instead. Much less head aches as Intel Linux drivers and apps are second to none and have a unified memory model. The performance and efficiency of AMD APUs is still great though, especially under Windows, but the overall implementation as a whole package seems poorly thought out and rushed out the door, especially under Linux compared to Intel.
- vetinari 5y ago
  Isn't this some distro-specific problem? VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). VP9 is not supported in hardware on UVD-based GPUs (i.e. discrete Vega). VCN 3.0-based GPUs (i.e. RDNA2, the 6000-series APUs) also support AV1 decoding.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >VP9 should be available since Mesa 18.1 (or so) for VCN-based GPUs (i.e. Raven Ridge and newer). Yeah, in theory it's available, but good luck actually getting your browser to use it to HW decode YouTube videos under linux out of the box. It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers. There are endless threads online about this not working. I for one, never managed to get it to work in any browser. What a mess.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      > It usually works fine with video players like mplayer but not in browsers. Chrome doesn't support VA-API, so do not bother trying. Some distributions do have Chromium builds with VA-API support enabled, but YMMV. Chromium uses X11 only and libva requires dri2, so it doesn't work under XWayland, which supports only dri3. (=> Chromium with VA-API works only in native X11 session) Firefox does support VA-API. There was a period of time, when it did only under Wayland, but nowadays both X11 and Wayland should work. When running under Wayland, use the native version and /not/ via XWayland, because the same thing as with Chromium applies.
      - mrkstu 5y ago
        The above is a fair summation of Linux's failure as a desktop in a single post.
        vetinari 5y ago
        Maybe it is, but keep in mind, that Chrome is a proprietary application - the Linux community and the desktop communities have exactly zero input, what will and what will be not supported. On the Firefox side, Redhat and Suse people did the work to support video acceleration.

jrockway 5y ago

I never had any problems with the NVidia driver either, and I can't see how it would prevent the system from booting. (I mean, it's not linked with the kernel and not set to load the module until X starts, so you can get to a single user mode console or SSH in if X breaks. Maybe people think X and booting are the same thing?) The only complaint I had with NVidia was that a long time ago I had one of the first consumer-grade 4k displays, and it exposed itself as 2 1920x2160 displays. That all worked ... "great". X thought the monitor was two displays, and so anything that cares about the calculation of display boundaries (say, full screen video), didn't work correctly; it would just show on half the monitor. One day I found that a config parsing bug could cause the xrandr extension to be disabled while keeping everything else working, and then full screen worked. (The options to just lie to xrandr or disable it were of course broken, which is why bugs interacting with bugs was the fix. They never fixed the bugs or the bugged bugs, so shrug I guess.) It took me months of pulling out my hair to find that workaround, and having used X since before xrandr was invented it drove me crazy. In a past life, I also pulled out all my hair to get xrandr to work. It never fucking worked. And then the one time you don't want it to work, it works and can't be made not to work. Argh!!! Just send me back to 2000 please! (Since then I've switched to Windows, and I still have that monitor. It works perfectly under Windows. You wouldn't even know that it uses the hacky Displayport MST stuff. Probably have a nice hack hard-coded right into the driver, and if it doesn't activate for some reason, you're completely screwed.)

smegger001 5y ago
Your right I suspect as I have had this problem myself; it is boot-able, but it will break the Xserver in such away that it can't even change to text only terminal to fix it. So I have to go into single user mode uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver then reboot, and it magically works again. I think it is the installer breaking if there is a old copy installed already rather than a bug in the actual driver itself. This happens every 3-4 months on my Ubuntu gaming laptop.

pizza234 5y ago

I've had a few Nvidia cards (from 9xx to 20xx) and one (very modern) AMD. The AMD drivers runs fine. They're functionally inferior to the Nvidia ones (in several aspects), but I had no big problems. I don't play on Linux, though. I think open source makes a significant the difference - with Nvidia, issues often can't be solved by software devs (e.g. Libreoffice Calc running updating the screen very slowly). I suppose that with open source drivers, devs can at least get an idea of what's going on. However, there's one dealbreaker with Nvidia - they have such "blob of a cards", that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau) can't run at all with many Nvidia card series. I couldn't even boot with a GT 1030 (among the others). I actually have no idea how people can install Linux on Nvidia systems, since I had to create an adhoc iso with the binary drivers preinstalled.

josefx 5y ago
> that Linux, on a default configuration (which means, ISO with Nouveau) To this day I cannot think of a good reason to ship nouveau outside of "lets make users with nvidia cards suffer". I get the idea behind the nouveau project, but pushing an experimental driver that cannot work with 99% of the hardware it latches onto and forces users to disable it if they want a basic working system is actively malicious.
- gryn 5y ago
  I don't know the last time you used nouveau drivers but this is just wrong. is it feature complete ? no, but to go ahead and say it's not working for 99% is just lying here is the list: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html what you can say though is that it is a bad idea for GPU that are relatively recent. wont block you from booting or displaying to screen but would probably be slow. also this is distro dependent, I remember being given the choice with no default one (mean chosen automatically) when installing Manjaro (a derivative of arch linux). I chose the proprietary driver since they are feature complete but later switched to nouveau driver since they are not prone to breaking on every other update. that was 2 years ago, zero problems since.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Yes, AMD is fine. Intel works well if you get a computer with an iGPU, but the last time I looked, AMD's iGPUs were a bit more powerful. You'll want a Nvidia card for ML, unfortunately.

orwin 5y ago

Amd after their island cards just works.

lnxg33k1 5y ago

I have built my desktop with top end components: ASRock X570M Pro4, ASUS ROG Radeon RX 6800, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, WDBlack Nvme, and I have no issue at all with drivers or anything (I also use gentoo with a self-configured kernel, no genkernel). It's my daily driver for working and gaming 4k (with 3 4k monitors) Linux has no issue with drivers and/or video cards in particular, people just need to pay some attention when buying components, saying that linux has issues with graphics because of nvidia it's a bit unfair, nouveau is not able to use acceleration because the videocard doesn't activate it if it isn't loaded by the official nvidia blob, so if linux is supposed to have issues with graphic card while vendors actively create obstacles, we will never figure the real issue and hold the right people accountable: It's nvidia that has still issues with linux

NavinF 5y ago
That works if you don’t care about deep learning or use any apps that need CUDA
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Yeah but why do we blame linux if it's the official nvidia drivers that sucks and when the video cards doesn't work with acceleration if you don't use that driver that sucks? What is linux supposed to do?
  - NavinF 5y ago
    I don’t care who’s to blame, but I’ll just say that the proprietary drivers work just fine on servers and I imagine they’d work fine on Desktop too if distros installed them automatically. Loads of people try Linux on a PC they already have instead of buying a new one that has upstream drivers for every component. This is yet another reason why Linux desktop will never have >2% market share.

mastax 5y ago

The AMD drivers are pretty good, at least a year after the cards are released. AMD has only just started doing the Intel thing of pushing driver support for GPUs before they are released so you often need to run bleeding edge kernel/Mesa or wait a while to get good support.