Old but gold. posting for anybody who hasn’t seen this yet.
I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly? With AMD, the 3D acceleration driver is bundled directly into VESA, so it’s already ready & working before even the first-boot of almost all desktop distros. That’s how drivers are supposed to work on Linux and it has taken NVIDIA 10+ years (and counting…) to get with the basic program.
I applaud the long overdue decision to move their proprietary firmware directly onto the card and making the rest of the kernel driver open-source, but I’ll remind you folks of a few things:
- The open source driver is still in an alpha with no timeline for a stable release
- NVIDIA has so far elected to control their own driver releases instead of incorporating 3D acceleration support into VESA
NVIDIA had to be dragged screaming to go this far and they’re still not up to scratch. There’s still plenty of fuel left in the “Fuck NVIDIA” gastank.
I believe that in addition, Nvidia support for wayland was late compare to AMD.
You basically have two option: suffer on nvidia, cause some feature may not be developed, or suffer on amd, cause developed feature just straight up do not work.
I recently realized, while dealing with some screen flickering with the most recent Nvidia drivers, that I had never used Linux without a Nvidia GPU. I’ve always had them in my computer so I always installed the driver. Lately I play mostly older games so I decided to remove the GPU and let my i9 sort out the graphics.
When I say it was a NIGHT AND DAY difference in overall quality I’m not kidding. Everything was buttery smooth and any lingering thoughts of missing Windows faded away. Honestly felt like I bought a new computer.
Now I’ve decided to sell my Nvidia GPU on eBay and either grab an AMD card or be bold and pick up an Intel Arc 750.
So in short, to echo Linus himself, fuck Nvidia.
I’ve only used one AMD card with Linux and it was so smooth I never thought about it. Lately I’ve been using nvidia for one year and I’m losing my sanity with it. Switching back to AMD next week.
I recall this from around the time I basically gave up dealing with Linux and Nvidia chips. At that time, I felt I couldn’t agree more. Has this improved in recent years at all? With Nvidia getting more into data centers as their focus, I figure Linux has to be a focus, no?
Things have improved a lot in the 11 years since Linus made that statement. For the most part Nvidia drivers just work. They have even released some opensource drivers fairly recently that will go a long way to making things even better, especially for the existing OSS drivers.
But they are still not perfect. They do keep doing their own thing for years before finally giving up and doing what everyone else is. The latest of which was the EGL Streams API nvidia created for wayland where everyone else was using GBM APIs which forced many window managers and applications to have to explicitly support nvidia drivers. But they have now switched to GBM like everything else (though last I heard their implementations were far from bug-free, things have likely improved since then those as that was over a year ago now).
Nvidia cards are mostly working fine these days as long as you’re not using Wayland. If you’re using Wayland, be prepared to encounter lots of minor annoyances, and perhaps some bugs that completely break your workflow depending what you’re using Linux for (e g. on server you don’t have to deal with sleep issues, but in desktop it’s an annoyance while on laptop it might be a deal breaker).
Honestly, you can downvote me for my opinion, but when we talking about current support from vendors and if you just wanna play damn games — nvidia just works.
Yes, nvidia lack of support for some features, or sometime they have their time to implement it, like egl for wayland support for example, but god damn, when we talk about smth more simple as playing games, nvidia is just better. You can literally stick bought card in, install blob driver and play. (On notebooks there a bit more hassle and a lot of stuff may not work, like sleep or auto poweroff of gpu for lower power consumption, but good luck find competitor nowadays, lol)
I have 7900xtx, and it’s fucking pain in the ass. Two (three technically) vulkan drivers, mesa need to be up-to-date to use smth like RT (and it’s still will suck, cause they just started working on RT support like month ago), downvolting do not work and probably will never work, according to some redditor who into amdgpu developing, clock control do not work, some card cant be controled by TDP, there a problem on wayland with VRR, there a two years old bug [1] [2], that cause memclock to stuck to maximum or minimum depending of your display refresh rate: imagine having 7900xtx and get like 20% of it performance, cause gpu don’t feeling like playing today. Oh, and you cant control RGB on the card yet, but that small inconvenience, and soon should be implemented, cause that lack of feature from openRGB, rather then kernel problem. Upd. Last one is a kernel problem, as pointed out for me by user below. Oh well.
I’ve got a 7900xt and idle power draw and heat generation is off the charts, so I must agressively sleep my computer when not in use. I’ve been hoping for an update to fix it, but nothing yet. And this isn’t really AMDs problem, but a lot of AI stuff just isn’t possible on RDNA 3, because the python libraries don’t support it. Some library updates have started supporting it, but often the tools to make the models work uses old library versions.
Sorry for late response, only notice you right now. For me, idle power draw is about 30w (60w if mem clock bagged out on high clock) on card. It’s worse than it should be (without memclock bug it’s about ~17w), but doable. If you have higher power draw, probably smth else broke.
I’d have to pull out my kill-a-watt to get an accurate reading, but my house grid increases by about .2-.3kw when my PC is on. That doesn’t count all my monitors and whatnot. It is a noticable drain on my houses grid at idle.
