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If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?
by caycep 5mo ago
If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?
- guizadillas 5mo agoyes
- notac26 5mo agoDef AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.
- graynk 5mo agoAMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
- eikenberry 5mo agoAMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-hdmi-2-1-support-is-coming-to-linux-now-with-frl-and-dsc/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
- cute_boi 5mo agoany reason why we are using hdmi over display port?
- saidinesh5 5mo agoThe vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..
- 0cf8612b2e1e 5mo agoI have been told (but not confirmed) that is mandated by the HDMI mob. If you want HDMI on your TV, it cannot also have DP.
- okanat 5mo agoThis can only be true for consumer-grade stuff. Even then I just guess the manufacturers kind of cheap out. I have a dumb-ish Samsung Hotel TV / commercial TV at home. It has DP.
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoI want a TV with DP. Do you have a recommended source for where to pick up commercial TVs?
- okanat 5mo agoI live in Germany and I got mine from https://www.visunext.de/ https://www.visunext.de/
- bee_rider 5mo agoWhich is kind of funny. At least, to my mind this has associated HDMI-only with the budget option (TVs), and DP with the premium tier (monitors).
- account42 5mo agoI'm pretty sure TVs go higher in price than monitors - although professional monitors do put up a fight.
- bayesnet 5mo agoWhat really drives me nuts is smart TVs with 100mbps Ethernet connections. When I bought a tv we looked in vain for gigabit Ethernet.
- bisby 5mo agoSome people have TVs or displays that only use HDMI. I personally wouldn't recommend HDMI if DisplayPort is available, but if HDMI is your only option, then having it work properly will be important.
- jaxefayo 5mo agoFor one, DisplayPort doesn’t support HDR output
- Gracana 5mo agoDo you mean in practice, or something? DP definitely supports HDR, and it seems to work fine for me.
- hmry 5mo agoThat can't be right. I'm reading this comment on an HDR monitor over DP right now. Don't all USB-C video outputs use DP alt mode too, with an HDMI adapter at the end? And they can do HDR.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- funimpoded 5mo agoThe cable length limitations are also a pain in the ass for not-uncommon A/V system configurations. 6' recommended max, and the best you might get working stably if the device and cable gods smile on you is 15'. 6' is the lower edge of acceptable for just about any A/V system setup (in practice it means your devices need to be within about a meter of the screen's port[s], which is pretty close) and even 15' is still too short to be useful for, say, a projector, or a "the A/V receiver or HDMI switch is over in that cabinet, the TV is on this wall across the room" situation. HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.
- Dylan16807 5mo agoFor 4k at 60Hz, you'd need HDMI 2.0 or DP 1.2. At those speeds, both kinds of cable should be able to reach 25 feet, and I can find reputable brands selling both kinds at the length.
- simoncion 5mo ago> HDMI goes 25'+, no problem. Yep. That's likely because that's an active cable. Active DisplayPort cables exist, too. Here is one vendor selling active UHBR10 cables [0]. If you don't NEED UHBR, then you'll find your selection to be much, much larger. I've been using some Monoprice-branded 50 and 100 ft active fiber-optic HBR3 DisplayPort cables for years with no problem. [0] <https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/displayport-cables/ci/27494/cp/9581%2B13346%2B27492%2B27494?sort=PRICE_LOW_TO_HIGH&filters=fct_displayport-version_7951%3A2.0%7C2.1%3AREGULAR%2Cfct_length_6411%3A30ft%7C50ft%7C100ft%7C200ft%7C300ft%3AREGULAR https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/displayport-cables/c...>
- eikenberry 5mo agoMy monitor has 1 displayport and 2 hdmi and I have 2 computers I use with it. They can't share the displayport. All comparable monitors (last time I checked) have the same. So it'd be nice if both worked.
- ThatPlayer 5mo agoUnless you're on the absolute newest stuff with DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DP1.4. That'll be Nvidias 2000 through 4000 series. No DisplayPort 2.1 until the RTX 5000s. And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too. Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
- esseph 5mo agoAMD Radeon 7000 and 9000 series all support DisplayPort 2.1
- account42 5mo ago6000 however does not but supports HDMI 2.1 (no yet on Linux).
- account42 5mo agoNot to mention TVs have been pretty much always been HDMI-only and they are the only realistic option for a living room sized monitor.
- somat 5mo agoI sort of figured that HDMI stupidity was strategically a good thing as it sort of brought the dynamic of the HDMI consortium and VESA. specifically how they treat the end users, more to the public eye. That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
- _puk 5mo agoI was faintly surprised that my recent monitor purchase came with a displayport cable. Didn't help connecting it to my Macbook, but still..
- esseph 5mo agoDisplayPort has been running the best PC high end monitors for a long while. HDMI OTOH has been in A/V land (DRM management).
- babypuncher 5mo agoDon't most monitors ship with DisplayPort cables? All of mine have. HDMI is more popular with TVs/home theater systems.
- tombert 5mo agoOutside of the ones built into laptops, all my "monitors" for the last decade have been TVs, just because they tend to be cheaper at a "price to size" level. None of them ever seem to have DisplayPort.
- babypuncher 5mo agoYeah TVs typically don't have DP, because extra HDMI ports are usually more valuable in a home theater setting. Game consoles, receivers, video players all have HDMI and don't have DisplayPort, meanwhile every graphics card and laptop usually supports both, so having an extra HDMI port ends up being more versatile.
- somat 5mo ago
- perching_aix 5mo agoI didn't follow this story much: how exactly did they get past the legal hurdles? Or there never actually were any hurdles, just sabre rattling?
- JCTheDenthog 5mo agoPurely rumor, but supposedly Valve put tons of pressure on them (no idea by what means, again this is all rumor) because they wanted support for the Steam Machine release.
- account42 5mo agoHoping they'll also add VRR - that's the one thing that isn't currently working with my DP->HDMI adapter setup, 4K@120Hz already works fine.
- anschl 5mo agoPeople say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
- stuxnet79 5mo agoWhich card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs. Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
- maplant 5mo agoI can't speak for the parent but I have a 5090 and it works perfectly fine
- davidspiess 5mo agoI run a GTX 970 on Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland) without issues. Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.
- okanat 5mo agoAnything between 700 and 2000 series (inclusive) is in this "completely proprietary due to signed firmware but also not fully supported in Wayland" zone. You need to have at least 3000 series to have proprietary drivers with open kernel driver and good KMS/GBM/Wayland support.
- saidinesh5 5mo agoNvidia on desktop has been mostly fine, if not rock solid, on the happy path they provide. But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time. Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
- 5mo ago
- SimianSci 5mo agoAMD does a lot of work to ensure their support for Linux is first-class. With the kernel now natively supporting their systems, you can expect good support. It's earned them some good will over Nvidia which has gotten better recently with the rise of AI, but still requires users to jump through a couple of hoops due to their attempts to protect their IP.
- somat 5mo agoIt is more than that, I really like openbsd as a desktop system. This is niche enough that I have zero expectation for any sort of support from the hardware vendors. However, because the amd drivers are opensource. Heroic people in the obsd dev community are able to make it work there. I don't strictly need a gaming gpu for my desktop work, but it is nice to have a setup I can boot linux on to play games with. Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
- account42 5mo agoPerhaps more importantly, AMD enables others (community, Valve, etc) to do the work themselves when they have different priorities from AMD.
- tapoxi 5mo agoI built a Linux gaming PC a few years ago, running Bazzite. AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
- everdrive 5mo agoAMD for sure. Years ago for Linux NVIDIA was the sure winner. At the moment, AMD beats it out soundly on both cost and performance. ie, the same game running on either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in Linux will generally run much better on the AMD GPU.
- tryauuum 5mo agoboth are shit I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit. Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox
- Pooge 5mo agoIn good faith, you can't really say "[x] is shit" if you don't have an usual setup; X11 is no longer the default on most distros. Even when I was also using it, it never crashed. I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
- traderj0e 5mo agoLinux Mint uses X11 for some reason. I was getting black screen after sleep because of that. Nuked it and installed Ubuntu, worked fine.
- lunar_rover 5mo agoRight now AMD is the better choice due to support from Valve. It might change in the future due to Red Hat's effort.
- the8472 5mo agoFor gaming and desktop use AMD is great, though for raytracing you'll need newer cards. If you want to run local AI models too then AMD is quite shaky, rocm only supports a few cards with each version and their software stack just isn't as polished as nvidia's.
- MattPalmer1086 5mo agoJust anecdata, but I just got a Lenovo T16 with AMD. Graphics is just painless, everything works with no issues. My old system with an Nvidia card running the same O/S keeps running into weird issues. It mostly works, just needs attention and little tweaks and extra stuff sometimes.
- ammut 5mo agoEnd of 2024 I did exactly that. Ryzen and RADEON all the way. Rocking Fedora right now but was using Ubuntu for a bit. I have no reason to use Windows at all.
- jimmaswell 5mo agoAFAIK none of AMD's offerings match the 5090 for pure gaming performance, so personally that's what I would stick with regardless.
- RussianCow 5mo agoSure, if you're made of money. For the rest of us, AMD gives you more bang for your buck. Though in this market, it's hard to argue that any of them give you good value.
- dgunay 5mo agoI bought AMD as my last GPU purely because it meant I didn't have to stress out about how I was actually going to acquire one. I just walked into Microcenter, picked one off the shelf, and checked out. It was the crypto craze then, and I get the impression that this hasn't changed much today with AI sucking all the oxygen out of consumer electronics. Didn't care very much about DLSS or any other Nvidia specific features. That AMD works well on Linux only sweetened the deal.
- uyzstvqs 5mo agoAMD has provided great support for far longer, but newer Nvidia cards which support the nvidia-open driver should also be good. Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.
- hx8 5mo agoI think this gets overblown a bit. AMD is better, but Nvidia can work. There's plenty of valid reasons to put in the extra effort and go with Nvidia.
- traderj0e 5mo agoI hope this is right, because "you have to use AMD GPU" is not what people want to hear when building a PC.
- hx8 5mo agoI know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.
- bee_rider 5mo agoAlthough, eventually NVIDIA will drop support for your card and you’ll have an annoying situation. This happened for Pascal on Arch Linux a while ago. The 10X0 series are pretty old at this point, but then Linux shines on older systems too.
- notnullorvoid 5mo agoYou can still use the old drivers they work fine. This also isn't unique to Linux, Nvidia's latest Windows drivers also don't support 10 series cards anymore.
- jerf 5mo agoI run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck. Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.
- progforlyfe 5mo agoyes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.
- notnullorvoid 5mo agoEither. If you want Nvidia features like DLSS then go with NVidia.
- LooseMarmoset 5mo agoNvidia makes a fine GPU. The problem with Nvidia on linux is the drivers. You're beholden to Team Green for driver updates, and when they decide not to support a GPU anymore, that's it. Now, linux does have the nouveau driver, but that doesn't support all the hardware or much 3d at all, and never will. I particularly got fed up with Nvidia on linux playing War Thunder - I had a regular crash that Gaijin and Nvidia each blamed on each other, and I never did get it fixed. Nvidia driver updates can also leave you stuck with no desktop environment on occasion and while fixable, it's a pain in the rear. However, when the drivers are right, Nvidia performance is second to none. AMD has drivers built right into the kernel, and as long as you have whichever nonfree firmware repos your distro supports (I use Devuan, a Debian derivative), AMD cards 'just work'. If using xorg, install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu for modern cards, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon for older cards. I'm currently playing on a Radeon 9070 (non-XT) on a 1440p monitor with plenty of performance. I know that it also works on wayland, but I have no experience there.
- nialv7 5mo agoopen source nvidia is an area to keep an eye on. check out NVK and nova.
- mrsvanwinkle 5mo agoI technically have both in one laptop with an AMD iGPU and an RTX GPU. Most of my problems with archlinux is running a 240Hz HDR monitor on dGPU, where the NVIDIA firmware glitches into buffer out of memory errors not reading the CDID properly, and this was solved only less than a month ago with latest beta driver. Lingering problem is waking from memory with crashed plasmashell but this one is KDE Plasma specific, while the monitor one is Linux wide.