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You can say a lot about nVidia, but for me all their products mostly just work on Linux(I use cuda a lot). I don't understand why AMD is having such trouble doi

You can say a lot about nVidia, but for me all their products mostly just work on Linux(I use cuda a lot). I don't understand why AMD is having such trouble doing the same. Likewise with CPUs. It is ironic I have to be using Intel's math libraries to get good performance out of my AMD CPU.

xbeuxhedovksb 3y ago
Having a Nvidia Linux gaming setup, from my experience it doesn't work well at all : broken wayland, no hw video enc, etc. Sure some of those could be solved by sending weeks trying hacks things like VA-API over NVDEC emulation, but at the end of the day this is waste of time, tl:dr everything works on Nvidia Windows, many things broken on Nvidia Linux. NVidia on Linux is only good for non desktop use : cuda/compute/ml over ssh. AMD is the exact opposite, desktop things work better except there is no cuda/compute/ml So if you want something that works over the whole spectrum : desktop, wayland, compute/ml, video enc/dec, screen sharing, etc. it doesn't exist on Linux
shmerl 3y ago
For gaming and desktop usage, situation is completely the opposite. Nvidia is plagued by having not upstreamed drivers, and AMD just works.
- amlib 3y ago
  really on linux you would be better off having a primary amd or intel gpu and then a secondary nvidia gpu just for compute/cuda tasks. But alas, many new am5 motherboards don't even have a secondary 16x pci-e slot capable of even pcie-4 4x bandwidth anymore. I guess we should thank this cloud compute craze for that...
  - shmerl 3y ago
    Some like Asrock reduced the number of PCIe slots and increased the number of USB 4 ports. So there is an option at least to use an external GPU now, since that's where they are re-allocating available bandwidth it seems.
sosodev 3y ago
This hasn’t been my experience on Linux. The nvidia drivers appear to “just work” but actually caused a lot of instability. My desktop no longer crashes every other day (or more often when gaming) since switching to an AMD GPU.
- theresistor 3y ago
  I always see this comment, but I have used NVidia GPUs for gaming on Linux for a decade and they have always worked perfectly with the proprietary drivers.
  - sosodev 3y ago
    The thing with Linux is that it’s extremely fragmented. We could be running totally different setups from both a hardware and a software perspective. When using Linux i’ve regularly encountered the “it just works” argument and then been disappointed when it in fact did not. The only thing I can do is accept that my own experience with Linux is unique and try to optimize for my own situation. Nvidia has historically been decent for me but AMD has been significantly better.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  They work absolutely fine if you stick with what worked five years ago and don't update anything until some Nvidia blog says you should. Just don't use Wayland, don't use too many screens, don't use a laptop, don't run a recent kernel and don't expect software features like their special sauce screen recorder, or that trick where you can get a free camera inside a game, or anything else packed into their gaming toolkit on Windows. Oh, and accept a very high idle power draw if you choose not to go with Windows. With all of that, most games work out of the box. CUDA works, video encoding and decoding works (though you're severely limited in terms of the number of simultaneous streams without hex editing the driver). I do get the occasional Nvidia related crash, but it's been a while. Still, I don't think I'll ever consider buying Nvidia for a Linux device again. I was a fool to think "Nvidia has come a long way, I'm sure a laptop with an Nvidia GPU will work fine with a few tweaks".
  - 3y ago

xbeuxhedovksb 3y ago

Having a Nvidia Linux gaming setup, from my experience it doesn't work well at all : broken wayland, no hw video enc, etc. Sure some of those could be solved by sending weeks trying hacks things like VA-API over NVDEC emulation, but at the end of the day this is waste of time, tl:dr everything works on Nvidia Windows, many things broken on Nvidia Linux. NVidia on Linux is only good for non desktop use : cuda/compute/ml over ssh. AMD is the exact opposite, desktop things work better except there is no cuda/compute/ml So if you want something that works over the whole spectrum : desktop, wayland, compute/ml, video enc/dec, screen sharing, etc. it doesn't exist on Linux

shmerl 3y ago

For gaming and desktop usage, situation is completely the opposite. Nvidia is plagued by having not upstreamed drivers, and AMD just works.

amlib 3y ago
really on linux you would be better off having a primary amd or intel gpu and then a secondary nvidia gpu just for compute/cuda tasks. But alas, many new am5 motherboards don't even have a secondary 16x pci-e slot capable of even pcie-4 4x bandwidth anymore. I guess we should thank this cloud compute craze for that...
- shmerl 3y ago
  Some like Asrock reduced the number of PCIe slots and increased the number of USB 4 ports. So there is an option at least to use an external GPU now, since that's where they are re-allocating available bandwidth it seems.

sosodev 3y ago

This hasn’t been my experience on Linux. The nvidia drivers appear to “just work” but actually caused a lot of instability. My desktop no longer crashes every other day (or more often when gaming) since switching to an AMD GPU.

theresistor 3y ago
I always see this comment, but I have used NVidia GPUs for gaming on Linux for a decade and they have always worked perfectly with the proprietary drivers.
- sosodev 3y ago
  The thing with Linux is that it’s extremely fragmented. We could be running totally different setups from both a hardware and a software perspective. When using Linux i’ve regularly encountered the “it just works” argument and then been disappointed when it in fact did not. The only thing I can do is accept that my own experience with Linux is unique and try to optimize for my own situation. Nvidia has historically been decent for me but AMD has been significantly better.
jeroenhd 3y ago
They work absolutely fine if you stick with what worked five years ago and don't update anything until some Nvidia blog says you should. Just don't use Wayland, don't use too many screens, don't use a laptop, don't run a recent kernel and don't expect software features like their special sauce screen recorder, or that trick where you can get a free camera inside a game, or anything else packed into their gaming toolkit on Windows. Oh, and accept a very high idle power draw if you choose not to go with Windows. With all of that, most games work out of the box. CUDA works, video encoding and decoding works (though you're severely limited in terms of the number of simultaneous streams without hex editing the driver). I do get the occasional Nvidia related crash, but it's been a while. Still, I don't think I'll ever consider buying Nvidia for a Linux device again. I was a fool to think "Nvidia has come a long way, I'm sure a laptop with an Nvidia GPU will work fine with a few tweaks".
- 3y ago