Old but gold. posting for anybody who hasn’t seen this yet.
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.
The RGB control is a kernel problem not an OpenRGB problem (well, it might also be an OpenRGB problem if the card doesn’t work in Windows either). The amdgpu kernel driver doesn’t expose the i2c interfaces not associated with display connectors, so the i2c interface used for RGB is inaccessible and thus we can’t control RGB on Linux. AMD’s ADL on Windows exposes it just fine.
That said, I can’t agree that NVIDIA just works. Their drivers are garbage to get installed and keep updated, especially when new kernels come out. Not to mention the terrible Wayland support and lack of Wayland VRR capability. I’m happy with my Arc A770 (whose RGB is controlled over USB and just works, but requires a motherboard header).
This is from 10 years ago. Nvidia sucked those days. The demand from machine learning changed all that and forced Nvidia to go open source.
NVIDIA never really went open source…they opened up their kernel drivers to a degree (by moving the majority of the interesting bits into the GPU firmware at that) but the userspace portion (Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, etc) is still very much closed source.
Ironically, my nvidia gpu laptop actually works better with nvidia than my pc with nvidia, at least on NixOS.
the TDP and the 2 years old bug that are being reported more and more as fixed in latest kernels?
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?
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.
This is just a circlejerk now.
