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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia.

I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying.

OpenBSD seems to be the only open source operating system that suggests that you get an AMD card (or use Intel integrated graphics).

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If you are ok with a proprietary driver and all the headaches that come with it, NVidia drivers are better for some 3-4 years after you buy a high-end GPU or 1-2 years after you buy a low-end one. After this time, NVidia drops support and you are stuck with a free driver that is much worse than the AMD ones (not by fault of the free drivers developers, mind you, but because NVidia makes their life hard).

Personally, I do prefer to avoid the headaches from day 1, so it's AMD or Intel.

I use an nVidia GeForce 8200 (published in ~2007) in my mediacenter and I don't have problems with drivers (v340.xxx legacy series: latest update is v340.107 https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/135161/en... ) on Arch Linux.

Same thing with a GTX 760 (currently using v390.42) on Gentoo: I kept that server running multiple times for many weeks at a time and never had crashes/weird things happening while doing GPU-mining, playing or just having the GPU idle while using the CPU.

As well with setting things up, I always just replaced the old card with the new one and that was it.

the post you reply to probably means support for gl regarding features and performance. a server and a media center will do fine even without proprietary drivers... well, until someone update the color stuff in v4l again.

Maybe? But then probably even AMD/ATI does not keep on tweaking their drivers more than nVidia to improve performance & OpenGL-compliance for all their 12 years old HW... (but I might be wrong).

>>a server and a media center will do fine even without proprietary drivers...

Honestly: not sure (never tried). My big question mark involving the GPU frequency scaling (maybe now an issue only with "Nouveau"?) when using video filters (e.g. framerate sync and/or nice upscaling filters).

I strongly recommend AMD. After a long time of using NVIDIA due to their superior Linux drivers, I got myself a Vega 64 when I built a new desktop computer last year. After so many years of driver woes, it was almost unreal having accelerated 3D graphics work out-of-the-box after installing Fedora. For my personal machines, I don't see myself going back to NVIDIA anytime soon.

I am on the same boat. but instead of a vega you can get the last generation best of the best for under $170! 60+% of performance for under 1/3 of the price.

Yeah, the Vega 64 (like most high end gear) is probably not worth the expense. I had a surplus of money at the time and I do GPU programming research, so I could justify it. I also hear that while it has nice compute performance, it's not as impressive for games.

You mean the proprietary Nvidia driver?

Because( no offense to the nouveau guys, you do great job, all things considered) but the open source one is in pretty bad shape and that is completely the fault of Nvidia.

Having to extra compile their driver (that does not conform to kernel standards) delivers a subpar experience for Linux users and taints the kernel. If they don't care about Linux users and help develop the open source driver, they I don't see any reason for buying their hardware. I rather spend it on hardware manufacturers that try to support me as a customer.

I think guy above was talking about the proprietary driver. While I have tried to be a fan of AMD/ATI because of their stance on opensource, for a long time AMD proprietary drivers sucked and had all sorts of problems and the open ones were noticeably slower. For a lot of people there wasn't really much choice.

Sounds like things are much better these days.

After years of having AMD video cards, I recently got a high end Nvidia card, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. For 3-D gaming, Nvidia cards were clearly better performance vs price. However, dealing with the proprietary driver is just a pain in the ass. With an AMD card, the open source driver just worked. With Nvidia, I have to keep re-installing the proprietary driver. Sometimes it doesn't compile with the current kernel (e.g. Debian testing). Finding the correct driver to download and install is a pain (try using the 'links' on nvidia's site).

If I build another PC, I'm going to very strongly prefer an AMD card.

Yep. I was on Nvidia+Intel exclusively for a long time, but I bit the bullet and went with AMD graphics for my most recent laptop purchase, and was blown away by it being reasonably performant out-of-the-box. My most recent desktop build was consequently AMD-only (Threadripper+Radeon); worked like a charm. Can't say I'm all that tempted to go back.

FreeBSD is definitely better with AMD. No one should be recommending nvidia in 2019.

There is unfortunately a little boot issue currently (amdgpu conflicts with the EFI framebuffer, so when booting with UEFI you have to turn efifb off, resulting in no display after the bootloader and until the GPU driver loads). But other than that, I'm very happy with amdgpu & Mesa.

I've gone through 3 different desktops and 4 different Nvidia GPUs in my Linux workstation over the last ~8 years and Nvidia's proprietary driver has never once been what I'd describe as "good"

There's regular display corruption and flickering on the desktop, most significantly on the second display.

All I need/want is basic 2D composition of the desktop, so maybe their 3D acceleration works better. But there doesn't seem to be any reason to put up with the crappy re-compilation path just to get kinda OK desktop performance with a heap of bugs.

I have other values. I dont need the absolute best performance and I'd rather spend money on a product from an OSS-friendly company. AMD is probably what will finally make me abandon intel integrated graphics for my Linux computers

Just built my new work workstation with 2970WX and RX 590. This is my first AMD workstation since the Thunderbird and everything has worked just great with Arch Linux using the open source drivers.

And my god it is fast...

If you think that card is fast using the Linux drivers, wait until you try it with the Windows ones.

The card is just to get two displayport outputs and open source drivers. The CPU is for work.

What about Linus giving the finger to Nvidia? I'm pretty sure that's a suggestion of some sort.

they seem to be difficult to work with as a company, but their desktop GPUs seem to mostly "just work" on Linux/FreeBSD - so for the user they seem to be better.

> Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better.

Not in the recent years. The trend has been positive for AMD and negative for Nvidia at least among Linux users for quite some time already.

See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

Not in all use cases (yet)... they still don't have a very compelling GPU compute story on Linux. There are reasons they've only made a minor dent so far and compute is one of them. As soon as they do, I'll be happy to switch my systems as I do like the direction AMD has been going the last couple of years on the driver front but they still have more work to do before it's viable for me.

> they still don't have a very compelling GPU compute story on Linux.

OpenCL AMD story has been rather flaky until recently, but supposedly ROCm is the most complete and open option there is now. You can also use Vulkan for compute purposes as far as I know. And Vulkan support isn't behind Nvidia in any way.

Some further Vulkan+OpenCL interop is still planned by Khronos.

See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Ecosystem/issues/42#i...

I did have an AMD card many (~10?) years ago, but I ended up replacing it with an nVidia because A) it was very noisy and B) Linux support was bad => I always used nVidia since then and never had problems with many types of setups and hardware, therefore I never switched back.

I will reevaluate both brands for the next switch. I would like to use AMD because of its friendliness/efforts towards open-source, but it has to perform (not "top" but at least "good") & be stable & be silent.

Loudness has more to do with each individual card and how the manufacturer built/designed it than it does with AMD/Nvidia. Read GPU reviews online and you will see that, even within the same model (e.g. RX 580), some cards are known for being unreasonably loud while others are near silent.

You're fuzzy/vague and you assume that I did not perform a selection of what I decided to buy at that time and you state about huge differences of loudness between brands of the same chip without posting proof.

I didn't assume anything, I just wanted to point this out to clarify that fan noise isn't just about the card itself. As for proof, there are lots of sites (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, etc) that compare different brands of cards by noise level—search for reviews of whatever card you're looking at and you're likely to find a chart comparing them. I've also personally experienced some rather large differences by switching brands of the same card, with both AMD and Nvidia.

>>I just wanted to point this out...

"this" what?

>>As for proof, there are lots of sites..

Pls. post the direct links to the specific pages that allow us to see such a direct comparison or to at least see data which can be compared.

I bought a netbook with an AMD APU, exactly because I wanted to support AMD and their open source efforts.

The pay I got was the downgrade of the available GPGPU features, which now requires the Windows drivers for me to actually make use of the DirectX 11 capabilities and accelerated video decoding, as the radeon driver for the APU only covers a subset of what fxgl was capable of.

So yeah, what is the point of supporting AMD again?

Nouveau developers actually suggested getting AMD cards multiple times (at least to me). I also went with AMD for my gaming rig. The only reason for me to choose nvidia is for computing (opencl/cuda)

AMD has the worst open source drivers for Linux. Pretty sure Ryzen APUs still aren't even properly supported. I would love to use AMD on everything, truly would. They are the best for a tight budget but the support just isn't there.

I'm using first gen ryzen with an RX560 with different Linux distros (Ubuntu, arch and void) and it works great. Especially for compiling and gaming.

I'm talking about the APUs using integrated graphics. If you are using an APU with a discrete graphics card you defeat the purpose of buying an APU.

You seem to life in an alternative universe than me.

Worst Open Source driver? In my universe that might be lima (no offense to the devs, I think freedreno, etnaviv and videocore drivers are a bit better and I don't think there is a PowerVR open source driver yet)

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