Hey, I'm assuming you both were referring to intel arc? I've looked into the a770, and with 16 gb of vram and some impressive specs would it be a good option? I've heard intel seems to be slightly more active with tools like oneapi than amd is with ROCm.

It looks like 1050 tis go for around $50-$90 which may allow me to get a 4060 ti or a 7700xt. How well does ROCm work with amd cards? Would ROCm work well enough in blender to contest a 4060 ti with cuda? Can existing cuda software be run with ROCm without developers porting it?

I completely agree that I should test it and do more research. Fortunately, a friend of mine has the 6700xt so I've asked him to test some of my most important softwares out on it (meshroom, blender, freecad). I also have said open source ideology, but I've got the mindset of if I get this gpu and support is dropped for it in say 10 years, how usable will it be at that point?

With most of my nvidia cards, X11 works great most of the time, but wayland is sketchy in most scenarios, and sometimes just won't boot at all on my gtx 670. I haven't used wayland as much as I've used X11(I use wayland on most of my systems with igpus), and while I don't do a ton of gaming, I do use, and love experimenting with linux. It sounds like amd may provide a smoother desktop for linux so ill need to take that into account as well for a gpu upgrade.

At the moment I'm torn between getting an nvidia card and waiting for nvk to be developed, or getting an amd card and waiting for ROCm to be developed. As a side note, I realized while I will still hold onto my 1050 ti, I may not have enough pcie lanes to run said new gpu at full 16x and instead may put my 1050 ti in one of my proxmox nodes (maybe use it for a blender cluster idk). How have freecad and blender been with the 5600xt? I'm just wondering if amd may be a better long term option because of its raw power and already existing open source drivers.

I dual boot debian and arch with debian being primarily for workstation tasks and arch being for gaming and any software I want a more recent version of (kicad). It sounds like freecad is mostly cpu bound, and I haven't used solidworks at all yet (I may take a mechanical engineering class where they'll be using it). Considering amd is higher performing in raw power can ROCm be good enough to work as I wait for it to catch up to cuda?

I'm new to ROCm and HIP, do you think that they'll improve over time? Does amd have an existing implementation for any cuda software or must developers port stuff over to ROCm? I ask this because most of my cuda software already runs ok ish on my 1050 ti so if I went amd it may provide reasonable performance with possible ROCm development in the future. Also you mentioned ai/ml and I'd actually really like to give tensorflow a try at some point. At the moment It seems that each gpu has features that are in development (nvk vs ROCm), and whichever I go with it sounds like i'll be crossing my fingers for each to mature at a reasonable time. At the moment I'm leaning nvida, because if nvk gains traction in a few years, It could provide a good open source alternative to switch to.

Yeah, my use case is definately more in the 10+ years range lol I've only recently learned about rocm and hip for amd which may show promise as well. Do you think nvk will have matured more by then?