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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 compla

by 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]
- ryao 2y ago
  I have a friend who uses multiple displays on his 3080 using the Nvidia driver. They work for him. It sounds like your issue is related to the dma buf issue that the kernel developers created. I thought that was fixed in recent versions of the open source Nvidia driver. What was the last driver you tried?
righthand 2y ago
They are not a myth, those cards frequently have issues with newer hardware and a whole handful of issues wayland itself such as screen tearing.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  The thing is if you don’t need graphic output they are rock solid. I can understand how someone who might use them primarily in headless servers would say the drivers are great.
  - ryao 2y ago
    Graphics output is largely issue free on Nvidia too.
    - johnnyjeans 2y ago
      this has never been the case for me, and evidently for the vast majority of others as well.
      - ryao 2y ago
        Those who have had or perceived issues tend to be the loudest. I have had a good experience with Nvidia and when there is an issue, I report it and Nvidia fixes it within months. The only time I have seen a better turn around was Intel graphics, where they fixed things within 24 hours after I pointed out a bug in their kernel driver. AMD graphics on the other hand seems unresponsive to community reports or outright refuses to handle issues. For example, they refused to implement VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock in AMDVLK despite implementing the equivalent for D3D12 on Windows: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 The damage in that case is limited to Windows, as the community driver for Linux implemented it, but it made cross platform support in emulators more difficult. If it were not for Valve working on the community driver, the Linux experience on AMD graphics would be no where near how good it is on Nvidia graphics.
- 2y ago
ForTheKidz 2y ago
It's just not stable at all. It seems to work fine when it can work stably.
- ryao 2y ago
  It is largely a just works experience for me. I report when there are bugs (like the most recent driver causing black screens on my monitor when VRR is enabled) and Nvidia usually fixes them in a few months.
tgmatt 2y ago
Contrary to what other people are saying, I've had no significant issues with nvidia drivers on Linux either, but I use X not Wayland so that may be why. Play tons of games, even brand new releases, without issues.
- ryao 2y ago
  I have used both. The experience on both of them is at parity right now.
ChocolateGod 2y ago
> support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them) This is not true. There were many differences with how Nvidia had been doing things in their drivers (partially due to them reusing code on all platforms) and how Mesa/Wayland was already doing things, namely with explicit/implicit sync and GBM/EGL streams, but there was no intention to make things hard for Nvidia. Mesa/Wayland ended up supporting explicit sync so Nvidia's driver could work.
- ryao 2y ago
  DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentionally sabotaged third party driver developers. Saying otherwise is contrary to reality. Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too. That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
    - ryao 2y ago
      It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.
dismalaf 2y ago
Dunno, I have an Nvidia card in my laptop, while it "works" on Linux (even Wayland), it also heats the laptop up so incredibly hot that the laptop's thermal settings just turn it off. No way to throttle it, increase fan speed, etc..., at least not without a bunch of hackery I don't want to deal with. All for performance that's in many cases worse than the integrated Intel card (since the integrated card has access to 16gb ram versus the GPU's 4gb).
- ryao 2y ago
  You might want to look into Nvidia coolbits. Those give fan control and frequency control. Alternatively, you could set a power target using nvidia-smi.
kentonv 2y ago
Agreed. I've been using Linux desktops with nvidia cards for like 25 years. Every now and then I think "Well, everyone insists that Radeons work better on Linux, I'll give one a try", and every single time it turns out to be worse and I end up switching back. Yeah the drivers aren't open source but, like, they work? Yeah I may have been held back from switching to Wayland for a while but... honestly I did not care. With all that said, I would really like to see AMD compete particularly in the AI space where nvidia seems to be able to charge totally wild prices that don't seem justified...
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Personally, I've seen way more Nvidia specific issues in the mpv bug tracker than AMD. CUDA vs ROCm (Rusticl?) is probably another story, though.
- tomnipotent 2y ago
  > I've seen way more Nvidia specific issues in the mpv bug tracker than AMD Could that maybe be because Nvidia now has almost an order of magnitude more customers? I think they closed 2024 with 90% market share.
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    mpv is still very much Linux majority and AMD is (relatively) more popular on that platform, I'd wager.
    - tomnipotent 2y ago
      It's possible they have a higher percentage of AMD users than other communities, but I highly doubt given the market share that it's statistically possible for AMD to outnumber Nvidia.

by ryao 2y ago

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]
ryao 2y ago
I have a friend who uses multiple displays on his 3080 using the Nvidia driver. They work for him. It sounds like your issue is related to the dma buf issue that the kernel developers created. I thought that was fixed in recent versions of the open source Nvidia driver. What was the last driver you tried?

righthand 2y ago

They are not a myth, those cards frequently have issues with newer hardware and a whole handful of issues wayland itself such as screen tearing.

BoredPositron 2y ago
The thing is if you don’t need graphic output they are rock solid. I can understand how someone who might use them primarily in headless servers would say the drivers are great.
- ryao 2y ago
  Graphics output is largely issue free on Nvidia too.
  - johnnyjeans 2y ago
    this has never been the case for me, and evidently for the vast majority of others as well.
    - ryao 2y ago
      Those who have had or perceived issues tend to be the loudest. I have had a good experience with Nvidia and when there is an issue, I report it and Nvidia fixes it within months. The only time I have seen a better turn around was Intel graphics, where they fixed things within 24 hours after I pointed out a bug in their kernel driver. AMD graphics on the other hand seems unresponsive to community reports or outright refuses to handle issues. For example, they refused to implement VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock in AMDVLK despite implementing the equivalent for D3D12 on Windows: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/108 The damage in that case is limited to Windows, as the community driver for Linux implemented it, but it made cross platform support in emulators more difficult. If it were not for Valve working on the community driver, the Linux experience on AMD graphics would be no where near how good it is on Nvidia graphics.
2y ago

ForTheKidz 2y ago

It's just not stable at all. It seems to work fine when it can work stably.

ryao 2y ago
It is largely a just works experience for me. I report when there are bugs (like the most recent driver causing black screens on my monitor when VRR is enabled) and Nvidia usually fixes them in a few months.

tgmatt 2y ago

Contrary to what other people are saying, I've had no significant issues with nvidia drivers on Linux either, but I use X not Wayland so that may be why. Play tons of games, even brand new releases, without issues.

ryao 2y ago
I have used both. The experience on both of them is at parity right now.

ChocolateGod 2y ago

> support xwayland acceleration (mostly due to Linux mainline making it harder for them) This is not true. There were many differences with how Nvidia had been doing things in their drivers (partially due to them reusing code on all platforms) and how Mesa/Wayland was already doing things, namely with explicit/implicit sync and GBM/EGL streams, but there was no intention to make things hard for Nvidia. Mesa/Wayland ended up supporting explicit sync so Nvidia's driver could work.

ryao 2y ago
DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentionally sabotaged third party driver developers. Saying otherwise is contrary to reality. Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too. That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
  - ryao 2y ago
    It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.

dismalaf 2y ago

Dunno, I have an Nvidia card in my laptop, while it "works" on Linux (even Wayland), it also heats the laptop up so incredibly hot that the laptop's thermal settings just turn it off. No way to throttle it, increase fan speed, etc..., at least not without a bunch of hackery I don't want to deal with. All for performance that's in many cases worse than the integrated Intel card (since the integrated card has access to 16gb ram versus the GPU's 4gb).

ryao 2y ago
You might want to look into Nvidia coolbits. Those give fan control and frequency control. Alternatively, you could set a power target using nvidia-smi.

kentonv 2y ago

Agreed. I've been using Linux desktops with nvidia cards for like 25 years. Every now and then I think "Well, everyone insists that Radeons work better on Linux, I'll give one a try", and every single time it turns out to be worse and I end up switching back. Yeah the drivers aren't open source but, like, they work? Yeah I may have been held back from switching to Wayland for a while but... honestly I did not care. With all that said, I would really like to see AMD compete particularly in the AI space where nvidia seems to be able to charge totally wild prices that don't seem justified...

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

Personally, I've seen way more Nvidia specific issues in the mpv bug tracker than AMD. CUDA vs ROCm (Rusticl?) is probably another story, though.

tomnipotent 2y ago
> I've seen way more Nvidia specific issues in the mpv bug tracker than AMD Could that maybe be because Nvidia now has almost an order of magnitude more customers? I think they closed 2024 with 90% market share.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  mpv is still very much Linux majority and AMD is (relatively) more popular on that platform, I'd wager.
  - tomnipotent 2y ago
    It's possible they have a higher percentage of AMD users than other communities, but I highly doubt given the market share that it's statistically possible for AMD to outnumber Nvidia.