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Is modern Radeon support on Linux still great? I've heard that NV Geforce on Linux was kinda bad since ever, but it has massively improved over the past 3-4 yea

Is modern Radeon support on Linux still great? I've heard that NV Geforce on Linux was kinda bad since ever, but it has massively improved over the past 3-4 years. Is Radeon still the way to go for Linux? EDIT: My usecase is a Linux gaming PC. I was fortunate enough to score an RX 6800 during the pandemic, but moved from Windows 10 to Linux a month ago. Everything seems solid, but I'm looking to upgrade the whole PC soon-ish. (Still running a Ryzen 1800X, but Ryzen 9000 looks tempting.)

thorw93040494 2y ago
As always, wait year or two so drivers catch up.
- righthand 2y ago
  A decade or two with Nvidia.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Nvidia has long been ahead of AMD. They seem to be close to parity right now thanks to Valve’s efforts, but that has historically not been the case. AMD was the one that needed a decade to catch up until Valve started helping. I wonder if the Radeon driver has gotten reliable GPU restart support. The GPU becoming unrecoverable if a shader crashed was long a major issue on Radeon on Linux, and I am not sure if valve fixed it for AMD.
    - awill 2y ago
      On Windows Nvidia has better drivers. On Linux, AMD is far ahead.
      - seventh12 2y ago
        Implying Windows Nvidia > Linux Nvidia?
      - ryao 2y ago
        It is mostly the same driver on both platforms. In any case, I use Nvidia’s 565.77 driver on Linux with KDE Plasma 6.2 and Wayland. It works well for me on my RTX 3090 Ti.
        tomnipotent 2y ago
        Most of the Linux Nvidia driver bugs seem to be related to the DRM/KMS layer, not the shared code. That's still a pretty big surface area.
      - renewiltord 2y ago
        Was never my experience over decades. Nvidia’s proprietary drivers were a pain the ass to install but they were great to use.
        TylerE 2y ago
        Ditto. I was around to remember the fglrx days on the AMD side. Ugggggggly. And that situation persisted for over a decade.
      - 0x457 2y ago
        > On Linux, AMD is far ahead. Depends on a metric. I found Nvidia drivers to be better on every platform. It's just because it's closed-source it's PITA to install and update, but everything in between is great. I've switched to AMD for religious reasons, tho. Even update story is worse on Windows for AMD, at least it was when I had RX 6900 XT.
        EndShell 2y ago
        When I was using my 1080Ti on Debian with the official driver, I would frequently have problems on screen 2 where there seemed to be no video acceleration. I could fix this temporarily through some setting in the Nvidia drivers but it would stop working after a reboot. I had several bad updates (this was when using Fedora) and was left with graphics 30 minutes before I had to start work, I ended up plugging in a really old AMD GPU to be able to work for the day and then spent several hours faffing to get graphics back up. I will only buy AMD/Intel cards now because it is plug and play on Linux. I've had no problems with the AMD card on Debian 12. On Debian 11 I had to enable a non-free repo to install the relevant firmware. The 1080Ti as awesome at the time as it was, only worked properly and reliably under Windows. The other issue with Nvidia is when they stop supporting your card, their drivers will sooner or later not work with the kernel. I have an older machine that works quite well and I had to buy another GPU as the legacy Nvidia drivers do not work with new kernels. The hardware itself works fine.
        0x457 2y ago
        Since it was a debian, i have to ask - was a driver 10 years old already when you used it? I also had 1080 Ti (and a regular 1080), worked flawlessly in: Windows 10, FreeBSD, NixOS. I don't recall versions I ran tho.
        EndShell 2y ago
        As I said there was issue where one screen wouldn’t be accelerated. This was on both Debian and Fedora this was around 2020. I started using Debian around 10 I think.
        2y ago
    - Zardoz84 2y ago
      Your info looks a decade old. AMD driver on Linux are better that NVIDIA. They simply just work out of the box.
      - ryao 2y ago
        I find Nvidia has a great out of box experience too, or as close to out of box that it can be when you run Gentoo like I do. Gentoo needs to have the drivers added to it. This applies to both AMD and Nvidia equally, since a basic Gentoo install has no graphics support. Anyway, Valve has improved the AMD community driver on Linux, but I have yet to hear any news on RADV being able to recover from GPU hangs. Nvidia’s driver can. The last I looked a few years ago, the security guys were begging the AMD driver developers to look at static analyzer reports. Meanwhile, the open source driver that Nvidia released shows that Nvidia uses static analyzers given that it has preprocessor directives from Coverity. I really would not regard AMD as being at Nvidia’s level yet on Linux, even if it is coming close.
aljgz 2y ago
I built my current home PC the day 4090 was release, and set up Fedora on it. It was usable at first, with some hiccups in certain updates, where I needed to stay with an older kernel for some time. Wayland on Nvidia was a mess, though. But as time goes by, things get better and better.
ryao 2y ago
Claims about the Nvidia drivers on Linux being bad are largely a myth. Nvidia has long been the gold standard on Linux (for decades). The main reason for complaints is that Nvidia was slow to support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them - see dmabuf being GPL symbol exported), but that has since been fixed.
- moxvallix 2y ago
  In my experience, with KDE Plasma, Nvidia is quite awful. Animations are laggy, and the desktop slows down when a new window opens. As well, there are a bunch of small issues I’ve only seen when using Nvidia.
  - ryao 2y ago
    I run KDE Plasma. I have no issues with the animations. I am not sure why your experience would be different. In the past, anyone experiencing that sort of thing had a MTRR issue from how the BIOS set things up that could be fixed by setting NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1 on the Nvidia kernel module, but I have not heard of anyone in that situation for a few years now. I had been under the impression that the setting was obsolete as Nvidia had made it the default behavior.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  Even on Arch it was usually quite fine the last 10 years or so. And if you go back that far you could've certainly have a lot of fun with fglrx (I know I did). In a commercial setting, with a supported distro, it's really very solid for desktop use.
- tpxl 2y ago
  nVidia drivers for laptops on Linux are still garbage tier. I either have a choice of no hardware acceleration and working external displays on noveau (which toasts my CPU) or no external displays, but working hardware acceleration, on nvidia drivers which is useless for me. I am definitely not buying an nVidia GPU ever again.
  - deleted 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
condenser 2y ago
I have both a modern Radeon and Nvidia card in my PC. Radeon overall offers a smoother desktop experience, and works fine with gaming, including proton-enabled games on Steam. OpenCL via rocm works decent, with some occasional crashes, in Darktable. Support for AI-frameworks like jax is however very lacking, and I spent many days struggling to get it to work well, before giving up and buying a nvidia card. geohot's rants on X are indicative of my experience. The nvidia card works great for AI-acceleration. However, there is micro-stuttering when using the desktop (gnome shell in my case) which I find extremely annoying. It's a long-known issue related to the power manager. In the end, I use the nvidia card as a dedicated AI-accelerator and the Radeon for everything else. I think this is the optimal setup for Linux today.
- ryao 2y ago
  I use KDE plasma and experience no microstutter with a Nvidia graphics card. Is there an open gnome issue for your issue on gnome?
  - seaal 2y ago
    I think it has something to do with the power management on NVIDIA card. When actively using it things are fine, but there will be a stutter when activating Activities or switching workspaces. I've tried using the triple buffering mutter patch[0] and still was experiencing issues. COSMIC is looking great but I have some weird screen artifacts randomly. Hyprland is the only environment that hasn't had any performance issues with my 4070 Super. [0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
  - condenser 2y ago
    I'm not sure, but I've found a couple of reports at nvidia's linux forum and their github issue tracker. This is with the open source kernel module & wayland. It's possible that X11 with the closed source module works better, but I prefer wayland.
zamalek 2y ago
I helped a friend install Linux last year; they had an NVIDIA card, aaaand they had problems. Both in X and Wayland. I'm was on a 6000 series at the time and it worked great, as you know. I am on a 7000 series now, and it's as smooth as ice. AMD is the way to go for Linux. There's that new NVIDIA driver cooking, but I'm not sure what the status is on it. BTW, even Ryzen 3 is a substantial upgrade over 1. Any X3D processor (I think 5 is when they first appeared) is even more so. Ryzen 5 is also less sensitive to RAM timings. I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost.
- brink 2y ago
  To be fair, I have an nvidia card, I had problems a year ago, but it's gotten a lot better in the past year.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  The status is that NVIDIA latest mostly works on Wayland now, but if you are on Debian the timer just started for it to not suck by default.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  > I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost. Being out of a job for a while makes me very loathe to upgrade hardware that still works OK. That 1800X still does what I want it to do, and does it 'fast enough', though how far into the future that will last is unclear. Cyberpunk 2077 being the most demanding game that I've played probably helps. :D
  - OmarAssadi 2y ago
    I feel that. It's difficult to justify any new hardware until I'm in a better place; while it'd be nice, I'm not suffering enough to /need/ a new system. Until the beginning of 2020, during university, I was still on a 3930K from launch-day in ~2011 and GTX 680. Honestly, I'm not sure I would've bothered if it weren't also for the fact that I wanted to be able to test AVX2 implementations of some of my code without relying on an emulator or someone else's machine every time. It probably helped that I mostly only care about Source games and RuneScape. But I haven't really played anything since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up in ~2022. I took his RX 480 to have a display-out and gave him my 2070 Super so it wouldn't go to waste.
undersuit 2y ago
I resorted to scripts from smxi.org for installing the Nvidia drivers on Debian and my GTX 770, but AMD RX 7800 XT is just fine with some firmware enabled. Ubuntu seems to be even better. I turned my system into a Frankendebian for a day to try out ROCm, the AMD install scripts work out of the box on newer Ubuntus.
EndShell 2y ago
I use a 6800XT with Debian 12. As long as you have the `non-free-firmware` repo enabled in Debian 12 (it is by default), AMD cards should just work. I've played quite a few games on Linux. Performance is still better on Windows though.
- Zardoz84 2y ago
  I'm using Debian testing with a RX7600XT . Performance it's the same or better on Linux. Helps a lot that the OS isn't a spam/spyware suite.
  - EndShell 2y ago
    That isn’t my experience at all. e.g Helldivers 2 I have to lower to medium setting, Black Myth Wukong I have to run at lower settings than Windows. This is with Debian Testing. It isn’t just I that have observed this. I have a friend using Arch and he noticed there is a higher input latency and worse performance. I’ve also noticed some weird mouse behaviour in Doom Eternal. It is enough of a difference that I just reboot into Windows now to play games.
yetihehe 2y ago
I use Radeon 7900GRE for gaming on linux mint without any problems, even tried some demoscene entries through steam (they didn't work with plain wine). Managed to run LM-Studio and deepseek-llama-70B, but installing ROCm support was a little more involved than "just download this and run", had to do several steps and install some missing packages, took me half hour.
attendant3446 2y ago
I had a laptop with a mobile GeForce RTX 4060 - it was a pain to run Linux on, mainly because of Nvidia. I got rid of it and built myself a PC (not just because of Nvidia, gaming laptops are just a disappointing experience). And went all in with Team Red - Ryzen and Radeon. It's a joy to run Linux on, I work on it and have played several games - 0 problems. Nvidia may be the leader in performance, but if it means you're stuck with Windows - I'd say it's not worth it.
ho_schi 2y ago
Buy AMD or Intel. Not Nvidia. Rationale: Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3] to support Wayland for a long time. Blaming that implicit sync was a disadvantage for Nvidia is not appropriate. They could've participated a long time ago and either adapt to implicit sync or help adding explicit sync years ago. Furthermore: * AMD gave us Vulkan as standard, which builds upon AMD's Mantle. * AMD gave us FreeSync i.e. VRR, which is usable by others. * AMD gave us FSR, which is usable by others. What did Nvidia? * High prices. * Proprietary and expensive GSYNC. * Refused to publish documentation and open-source drivers for many years. * Own video-decoding libraries. It is the documentation, drivers and Wayland. But the complete track record of Nvidia is bad. Their only argument are some benchmarks wins and press-coverage. The most important feature to all users is, reliability. And, Linus Torvalds[4] said everything. If Nvidia has changed its company politics and proofs that over years through good work it is maybe possible the reevaluate this. I don't see this within the next years. [1] Well. Decades? [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20101112213158/http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?s=99209e23a1013723450a623f49d4c1dd&p=2343452&postcount=11 https://web.archive.org/web/20101112213158/http://www.nvnews... [3] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nvidia-have-no-plans-to-support-wayland https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nvidia-have-no-plans-to-... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM
- globnomulous 2y ago
  > Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice. Is that what this is? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
  - seaal 2y ago
    https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t... It has only been a year since NVIDIA actually recommended using the open-source drivers and that's only for Turing (NV160/TUXXX) and newer. It's easier to use my AMD integrated GPU on (wayland) Linux than it is dealing with bugs from NVIDIA drivers.
worble 2y ago
Like another poster, I tried to help a friend move to Linux recently and he had an nvidia card, and it was nothing but problems. He eventually went back to windows and I don't blame him. But instead of random anecdotes, here's valves word on it: https://www.pcguide.com/news/nvidia-drivers-are-holding-back-a-widespread-steamos-release-most-people-wouldnt-have-a-good-experience/ https://www.pcguide.com/news/nvidia-drivers-are-holding-back...
mort96 2y ago
Older AMD cards have excellent Linux support across the board. Brand new AMD cards have great support -- in mainline Linux and MESA. But if you're using a kernel and MESA from a distro, you're gonna have a hard time for the first ~8 months. You'll either have to run a rolling release distro or make your own kernel, linux-firmware and MESA packages. I had to do this when I got a 7900XT card a few months after launch while running Ubuntu. This is the Linux driver model working as intended, and it sucks. I suspect you may also encounter issues with Flatpaks, since from my understanding, these use the MESA userspace from a runtime so they wont work until the Flatpak runtime they use updates their MESA. I don't think it helps to have a working MESA on the host system. I'm not 100% certain about this though, would love some feedback from people with a better understanding of these things.

thorw93040494 2y ago

As always, wait year or two so drivers catch up.

righthand 2y ago
A decade or two with Nvidia.
- ryao 2y ago
  Nvidia has long been ahead of AMD. They seem to be close to parity right now thanks to Valve’s efforts, but that has historically not been the case. AMD was the one that needed a decade to catch up until Valve started helping. I wonder if the Radeon driver has gotten reliable GPU restart support. The GPU becoming unrecoverable if a shader crashed was long a major issue on Radeon on Linux, and I am not sure if valve fixed it for AMD.
  - awill 2y ago
    On Windows Nvidia has better drivers. On Linux, AMD is far ahead.
    - seventh12 2y ago
      Implying Windows Nvidia > Linux Nvidia?
    - ryao 2y ago
      It is mostly the same driver on both platforms. In any case, I use Nvidia’s 565.77 driver on Linux with KDE Plasma 6.2 and Wayland. It works well for me on my RTX 3090 Ti.
      - tomnipotent 2y ago
        Most of the Linux Nvidia driver bugs seem to be related to the DRM/KMS layer, not the shared code. That's still a pretty big surface area.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Was never my experience over decades. Nvidia’s proprietary drivers were a pain the ass to install but they were great to use.
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Ditto. I was around to remember the fglrx days on the AMD side. Ugggggggly. And that situation persisted for over a decade.
    - 0x457 2y ago
      > On Linux, AMD is far ahead. Depends on a metric. I found Nvidia drivers to be better on every platform. It's just because it's closed-source it's PITA to install and update, but everything in between is great. I've switched to AMD for religious reasons, tho. Even update story is worse on Windows for AMD, at least it was when I had RX 6900 XT.
      - EndShell 2y ago
        When I was using my 1080Ti on Debian with the official driver, I would frequently have problems on screen 2 where there seemed to be no video acceleration. I could fix this temporarily through some setting in the Nvidia drivers but it would stop working after a reboot. I had several bad updates (this was when using Fedora) and was left with graphics 30 minutes before I had to start work, I ended up plugging in a really old AMD GPU to be able to work for the day and then spent several hours faffing to get graphics back up. I will only buy AMD/Intel cards now because it is plug and play on Linux. I've had no problems with the AMD card on Debian 12. On Debian 11 I had to enable a non-free repo to install the relevant firmware. The 1080Ti as awesome at the time as it was, only worked properly and reliably under Windows. The other issue with Nvidia is when they stop supporting your card, their drivers will sooner or later not work with the kernel. I have an older machine that works quite well and I had to buy another GPU as the legacy Nvidia drivers do not work with new kernels. The hardware itself works fine.
        0x457 2y ago
        Since it was a debian, i have to ask - was a driver 10 years old already when you used it? I also had 1080 Ti (and a regular 1080), worked flawlessly in: Windows 10, FreeBSD, NixOS. I don't recall versions I ran tho.
        EndShell 2y ago
        As I said there was issue where one screen wouldn’t be accelerated. This was on both Debian and Fedora this was around 2020. I started using Debian around 10 I think.
        2y ago
  - Zardoz84 2y ago
    Your info looks a decade old. AMD driver on Linux are better that NVIDIA. They simply just work out of the box.
    - ryao 2y ago
      I find Nvidia has a great out of box experience too, or as close to out of box that it can be when you run Gentoo like I do. Gentoo needs to have the drivers added to it. This applies to both AMD and Nvidia equally, since a basic Gentoo install has no graphics support. Anyway, Valve has improved the AMD community driver on Linux, but I have yet to hear any news on RADV being able to recover from GPU hangs. Nvidia’s driver can. The last I looked a few years ago, the security guys were begging the AMD driver developers to look at static analyzer reports. Meanwhile, the open source driver that Nvidia released shows that Nvidia uses static analyzers given that it has preprocessor directives from Coverity. I really would not regard AMD as being at Nvidia’s level yet on Linux, even if it is coming close.

aljgz 2y ago

I built my current home PC the day 4090 was release, and set up Fedora on it. It was usable at first, with some hiccups in certain updates, where I needed to stay with an older kernel for some time. Wayland on Nvidia was a mess, though. But as time goes by, things get better and better.

ryao 2y ago

Claims about the Nvidia drivers on Linux being bad are largely a myth. Nvidia has long been the gold standard on Linux (for decades). The main reason for complaints is that Nvidia was slow to support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them - see dmabuf being GPL symbol exported), but that has since been fixed.

moxvallix 2y ago
In my experience, with KDE Plasma, Nvidia is quite awful. Animations are laggy, and the desktop slows down when a new window opens. As well, there are a bunch of small issues I’ve only seen when using Nvidia.
- ryao 2y ago
  I run KDE Plasma. I have no issues with the animations. I am not sure why your experience would be different. In the past, anyone experiencing that sort of thing had a MTRR issue from how the BIOS set things up that could be fixed by setting NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1 on the Nvidia kernel module, but I have not heard of anyone in that situation for a few years now. I had been under the impression that the setting was obsolete as Nvidia had made it the default behavior.
formerly_proven 2y ago
Even on Arch it was usually quite fine the last 10 years or so. And if you go back that far you could've certainly have a lot of fun with fglrx (I know I did). In a commercial setting, with a supported distro, it's really very solid for desktop use.
tpxl 2y ago
nVidia drivers for laptops on Linux are still garbage tier. I either have a choice of no hardware acceleration and working external displays on noveau (which toasts my CPU) or no external displays, but working hardware acceleration, on nvidia drivers which is useless for me. I am definitely not buying an nVidia GPU ever again.
- deleted 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

condenser 2y ago

I have both a modern Radeon and Nvidia card in my PC. Radeon overall offers a smoother desktop experience, and works fine with gaming, including proton-enabled games on Steam. OpenCL via rocm works decent, with some occasional crashes, in Darktable. Support for AI-frameworks like jax is however very lacking, and I spent many days struggling to get it to work well, before giving up and buying a nvidia card. geohot's rants on X are indicative of my experience. The nvidia card works great for AI-acceleration. However, there is micro-stuttering when using the desktop (gnome shell in my case) which I find extremely annoying. It's a long-known issue related to the power manager. In the end, I use the nvidia card as a dedicated AI-accelerator and the Radeon for everything else. I think this is the optimal setup for Linux today.

ryao 2y ago
I use KDE plasma and experience no microstutter with a Nvidia graphics card. Is there an open gnome issue for your issue on gnome?
- seaal 2y ago
  I think it has something to do with the power management on NVIDIA card. When actively using it things are fine, but there will be a stutter when activating Activities or switching workspaces. I've tried using the triple buffering mutter patch[0] and still was experiencing issues. COSMIC is looking great but I have some weird screen artifacts randomly. Hyprland is the only environment that hasn't had any performance issues with my 4070 Super. [0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
- condenser 2y ago
  I'm not sure, but I've found a couple of reports at nvidia's linux forum and their github issue tracker. This is with the open source kernel module & wayland. It's possible that X11 with the closed source module works better, but I prefer wayland.

zamalek 2y ago

I helped a friend install Linux last year; they had an NVIDIA card, aaaand they had problems. Both in X and Wayland. I'm was on a 6000 series at the time and it worked great, as you know. I am on a 7000 series now, and it's as smooth as ice. AMD is the way to go for Linux. There's that new NVIDIA driver cooking, but I'm not sure what the status is on it. BTW, even Ryzen 3 is a substantial upgrade over 1. Any X3D processor (I think 5 is when they first appeared) is even more so. Ryzen 5 is also less sensitive to RAM timings. I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost.

brink 2y ago
To be fair, I have an nvidia card, I had problems a year ago, but it's gotten a lot better in the past year.
smallmancontrov 2y ago
The status is that NVIDIA latest mostly works on Wayland now, but if you are on Debian the timer just started for it to not suck by default.
theandrewbailey 2y ago
> I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost. Being out of a job for a while makes me very loathe to upgrade hardware that still works OK. That 1800X still does what I want it to do, and does it 'fast enough', though how far into the future that will last is unclear. Cyberpunk 2077 being the most demanding game that I've played probably helps. :D
- OmarAssadi 2y ago
  I feel that. It's difficult to justify any new hardware until I'm in a better place; while it'd be nice, I'm not suffering enough to /need/ a new system. Until the beginning of 2020, during university, I was still on a 3930K from launch-day in ~2011 and GTX 680. Honestly, I'm not sure I would've bothered if it weren't also for the fact that I wanted to be able to test AVX2 implementations of some of my code without relying on an emulator or someone else's machine every time. It probably helped that I mostly only care about Source games and RuneScape. But I haven't really played anything since my ex-girlfriend and I broke up in ~2022. I took his RX 480 to have a display-out and gave him my 2070 Super so it wouldn't go to waste.

undersuit 2y ago

I resorted to scripts from smxi.org for installing the Nvidia drivers on Debian and my GTX 770, but AMD RX 7800 XT is just fine with some firmware enabled. Ubuntu seems to be even better. I turned my system into a Frankendebian for a day to try out ROCm, the AMD install scripts work out of the box on newer Ubuntus.

EndShell 2y ago

I use a 6800XT with Debian 12. As long as you have the `non-free-firmware` repo enabled in Debian 12 (it is by default), AMD cards should just work. I've played quite a few games on Linux. Performance is still better on Windows though.

Zardoz84 2y ago
I'm using Debian testing with a RX7600XT . Performance it's the same or better on Linux. Helps a lot that the OS isn't a spam/spyware suite.
- EndShell 2y ago
  That isn’t my experience at all. e.g Helldivers 2 I have to lower to medium setting, Black Myth Wukong I have to run at lower settings than Windows. This is with Debian Testing. It isn’t just I that have observed this. I have a friend using Arch and he noticed there is a higher input latency and worse performance. I’ve also noticed some weird mouse behaviour in Doom Eternal. It is enough of a difference that I just reboot into Windows now to play games.

yetihehe 2y ago

I use Radeon 7900GRE for gaming on linux mint without any problems, even tried some demoscene entries through steam (they didn't work with plain wine). Managed to run LM-Studio and deepseek-llama-70B, but installing ROCm support was a little more involved than "just download this and run", had to do several steps and install some missing packages, took me half hour.

attendant3446 2y ago

I had a laptop with a mobile GeForce RTX 4060 - it was a pain to run Linux on, mainly because of Nvidia. I got rid of it and built myself a PC (not just because of Nvidia, gaming laptops are just a disappointing experience). And went all in with Team Red - Ryzen and Radeon. It's a joy to run Linux on, I work on it and have played several games - 0 problems. Nvidia may be the leader in performance, but if it means you're stuck with Windows - I'd say it's not worth it.

ho_schi 2y ago

Buy AMD or Intel. Not Nvidia. Rationale: Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3] to support Wayland for a long time. Blaming that implicit sync was a disadvantage for Nvidia is not appropriate. They could've participated a long time ago and either adapt to implicit sync or help adding explicit sync years ago. Furthermore: * AMD gave us Vulkan as standard, which builds upon AMD's Mantle. * AMD gave us FreeSync i.e. VRR, which is usable by others. * AMD gave us FSR, which is usable by others. What did Nvidia? * High prices. * Proprietary and expensive GSYNC. * Refused to publish documentation and open-source drivers for many years. * Own video-decoding libraries. It is the documentation, drivers and Wayland. But the complete track record of Nvidia is bad. Their only argument are some benchmarks wins and press-coverage. The most important feature to all users is, reliability. And, Linus Torvalds[4] said everything. If Nvidia has changed its company politics and proofs that over years through good work it is maybe possible the reevaluate this. I don't see this within the next years. [1] Well. Decades? [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20101112213158/http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?s=99209e23a1013723450a623f49d4c1dd&p=2343452&postcount=11 https://web.archive.org/web/20101112213158/http://www.nvnews... [3] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nvidia-have-no-plans-to-support-wayland https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nvidia-have-no-plans-to-... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM

globnomulous 2y ago
> Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice. Is that what this is? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
- seaal 2y ago
  https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t... It has only been a year since NVIDIA actually recommended using the open-source drivers and that's only for Turing (NV160/TUXXX) and newer. It's easier to use my AMD integrated GPU on (wayland) Linux than it is dealing with bugs from NVIDIA drivers.

worble 2y ago

Like another poster, I tried to help a friend move to Linux recently and he had an nvidia card, and it was nothing but problems. He eventually went back to windows and I don't blame him. But instead of random anecdotes, here's valves word on it: https://www.pcguide.com/news/nvidia-drivers-are-holding-back-a-widespread-steamos-release-most-people-wouldnt-have-a-good-experience/ https://www.pcguide.com/news/nvidia-drivers-are-holding-back...

mort96 2y ago

Older AMD cards have excellent Linux support across the board. Brand new AMD cards have great support -- in mainline Linux and MESA. But if you're using a kernel and MESA from a distro, you're gonna have a hard time for the first ~8 months. You'll either have to run a rolling release distro or make your own kernel, linux-firmware and MESA packages. I had to do this when I got a 7900XT card a few months after launch while running Ubuntu. This is the Linux driver model working as intended, and it sucks. I suspect you may also encounter issues with Flatpaks, since from my understanding, these use the MESA userspace from a runtime so they wont work until the Flatpak runtime they use updates their MESA. I don't think it helps to have a working MESA on the host system. I'm not 100% certain about this though, would love some feedback from people with a better understanding of these things.