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Comment by ZeroCool2u | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I wasn't planning on upgrading from a 1080 (non-Ti) but the 3080 is so good and priced so well, I probably will. I just ordered a 240 Hz 1440p IPS monitor and I wasn't planning to hit 240 Hz, but this makes it so easy I might as well.

My day job is primarily ML as well, so I might just go for the 3090. 24 GB of memory is a game changer for what I can do locally. I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers. Ubuntu has done some great work making things easier and just work, but having them directly in the kernel would be so much nicer.

One thing I'm curious about is the RTX IO feature. The slide said it supports DirectStorage for Windows, but is there an equivalent to this for Linux? I'm hoping someone with a little more insight or an Nvidia employee may have some more information.

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> I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers.

This has always confused me. They are pushing ML hard, yet we often use Linux for that kind of work. And these cards are the ones expected to be used in universities and home labs. Linux drivers that "just work" would be a big push forward to really show that they are trying to push for ML development.

I have several nvidia GPUs of different generations on Linux, and Nvidia drivers + CUDA "just work". They are closed source - that's bad - but I don't get what people are complaining about related to "just working". They DO "just work" (Arch Linux, both package and BLOB install...

Because some DEs like KDE have devs behind them that don't want to deal with non Open Source blobs out of principle so you get a terrible experience with Nvidia. Gnome is usually fine.

Isn't it funny and ironic, since Gnome is a GNU project and was created because KDE (Qt) wasn't FOSS enough.

They don't "just work" with Wayland, i.e. the future of Linux desktop.

Is this just for gaming/etc or does the desktop environment also cause issues if you’re just trying to use it as a highly parallel compute device?

The DEs are moving towards wayland.

That doesn’t really answer my question.... rephrased: all I do with high-powered GPU’s is Remote-SSH into hosted Linux machines and run ML jobs. Does this wayland thing have any impact there?

It should answer the question because the use case which you are stating (didn't before) is that you're using a headless environment. Which means you aren't using a DE.

IF you are using a server with a DE then it answers the question about how yes it does affect you because you are using a DE.

In either case, it isn't "just for gaming"

I'm here just to remind everyone that Wayland was first announced in 2007: ~13 years ago.

And Nvidia has been sabotaging it ever since.

Hell, even Canonical tried to sabotage it by starting their own NIHing alternative but thankfully Intel told them promptly to fuck off if they expect them to support it.

Jokes about the year of Linux on the desktop come to mind, but complex software that needs to track moving targets should be allowed time to mature.

They mostly work most of the time. When people say they want something that "just works", they are looking for more consistency than that.

I don't doubt that they work for you, but not everyone is so lucky. I have encountered serious reliability issues with their drivers.

The headache with Nvidia drivers and Linux is that depending on how new your model is and what distro you're using, you may or may not be able to load the GUI until you've manually upgraded kernel and disabled the Nouveau drivers (if enabled) then updated to latest nvidia-drivers-XXX package.

I tried to get Ubuntu/Pop_OS! 20.04 running on a dual-GPU laptop that has an RTX-2060 and AMD Renoir integrated. Had to modify kernel boot params to disable nouveau modeset and then run script for mainline kernel upgrade + drivers to get it to run. Was not a fun Saturday =/

But prior to this, yeah Nvidia non-open source drivers have mostly "just worked" for me on the older models.

Something interesting I've noticed is that there is a big difference in usability between desktops and laptops. Desktops I have far less issues. But laptops I have to get lucky to be able to use my HDMI port. And good luck doing that and having cuda support.

Out of curiosity, what laptop models + distros have you tried to set up?

On Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia GTX-1060Ti and i5, stock Ubuntu 20.04 loaded no problems, and even DisplayLink driver for dual monitor, one through regular HDMI + other through USB -> HDMI adapter worked (though I couldn't get it to rotate display vertically).

The bugs I did have were with it constantly re-disovering network printers that I had to disable, and changing the default wifi power-saving settings because something was funky with it.

On Asus TUF A15 with Nvidia RTX-2060/AMD Renoir + AMD Ryzen 7 4800h absolutely no distro worked out-of-the-box and I needed mainline kernel + latest Nvidia drivers. But after fixing that myself Pop_OS picks up everything perfectly and no problems.

Both of them have CUDA working IIRC (at least running "nvidia-smi" says it does).

I have an inspiron with a 1060Q and had similar problems on an HP envy (forgot the card in there). I've tried a bunch of distros (I've been on linux for about a decade and mainly run Arch though).

I have heard great things about Pop and I am going to be building a new machine with these new cards and giving pop a try.

Highly recommend Pop_OS!, it may as well be called "Ubuntu, except more driver patches and performance tweaks" haha.

And no Snap, although I suppose that could fall under performance tweaks.

> except more driver patches and performance tweaks

Honestly, to me that's not a big sell lol. And probably not to the type of people that like distros like Arch. We just want nivida to work like AMD and mesa drivers do. (Having done some testing, I am able to squeeze more performance out of a distro that builds up, such as Arch, vs a distro that you take down, like Ubuntu).

This is right. I am running Pop OS, but will make the jump to Arch when I have time. I don't want to wait for the distro maintainers to release new kernels/language versions/etc. And once you start changing those things, the benefit of the distro starts to fade away.

A nice middle ground is Manjaro (there's a nice GUI to select your kernel). Though I'm not sure what nvidia settings Pop uses, because I still have the above issues with Manjaro. But this may again be laptop centric.

I've used Manjaro on two legacy laptops and a fairly recent desktop and I can only vote for it for almost anything you would want to do with your machine. It's a very lightweight and well-supported distro that has outperformed machines that are on paper twice the speed of the one it's installed on.

Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.

I never really have Manjaro a look. My impression is/was that the focus of the distro was to be mac-like. Is that off base?

Usually, the best solution to putting Linux on a dual-GPU nvidia laptop is to stop doing it and go do something else.

Is that common to have dual-GPUs in a laptop?

Seems unnecessary to have dual-GPUs, and crazy to have both Nvidia and AMD in the one laptop.

One power hungry / hot one for gaming, one low-power / cool one for when not gaming.

From my experience with Optimus in the past: The system includes two GPUs, one that sucks for gaming and another one that also sucks for gaming :)

It's probably beter nowadays, but I will never consider it again.

But from two different manufacturers?

That's asking for trouble with driver issues.

Normally the low power gpu is the integrated Intel one that's on all their consumer chips, so it's more adding one gpu than slapping in competing ones. Although it does cause driver issues anyway, hence the thread.

Most laptops with any Nvidia hardware have two GPUs, one less power-hungry GPU integrated into the CPU and one dedicated GPU to play games on when you're connected to/sitting nearby a power outlet.

As good as the performance of mobile GPUs is these days, they still suck up a lot of power. I don't think you'll get much work done on the go with a laptop that only has a dedicated AMD/Nvidia GPU.

That something else is to use an eGPU if you need to, or to buy a desktop.

I mean, the constraints of a laptop and a desktop are as different as that of a car and a plane.

Laptops with dual-GPUs are as efficient as both as those car-plane convertibles.

I've also ran into this. Disabling Nouveau is a must.

90% good * 90% of the time = 81% good all the time [only :( ]

I've had an M4000 in my desktop and a P620 in a side-box, both running SuSE Tumbleweed for a year or so using the NVIDIA drivers. Once I got the initial setup done (follow the directions), I've had zero issues. Updates have been smooth, though there's an extra step now (hit ENTER to accept the NVIDIA license). GLMark2 score is a bit north of 7000.

AMD just works, as in the distro includes their drivers because they are open source.

Nvidia works if you add their repo and install the blobs, maybe. If your distro is mainstream enough.

Some distros include nvidia drivers.

I'll give you a few examples.

- Ubuntu 18 I had hit or miss with the hdmi connection on my laptop (1060Q). 20% of the time it would work if I plugged it in. 50% of the time it would work if I had it plugged in and rebooted. This makes giving presentations difficult.

- Arch/Manjaro/Fedora/Ubuntu 16 I could never get the hdmi connection working for a laptop.

- All distros, difficulty getting cuda running AND using the display. Intel drivers for display + nvidia for cuda works, but this means I can't use my GPU when I want to do some of the limited linux gaming.

Laptops seem to have more problems than desktops. On desktops I have many more hits than misses (if I have the graphics card installed when I install the OS). Laptops have just been terrible.

This is largely the fault of nvidia's optimus setup. They're starting to support it finally but it's still iffy

The market for gpus in Linux laptops is vanishingly small compared to the market in Linux server.

Most of the people driving server gpu purchases are used to sucking it up and doing their work over ssh, instead of locally.

NVidia has always been a headache for me. I run ATI on Linux. I use xmonad as a window manager, and NVidia's proprietary drivers just didn't handle multiple screens correctly. I switched to free drivers, and they did one fewer monitor than I was driving. I switched to ATI, and then things just worked.

What's more surprising is that ATI doesn't take this opening.

At some point Nvidia crippled their drivers if you didn't have a Quadro on Linux. Eg: No multi-monitor. Not sure how of that they do now. So some guy resoldered some resistors on a GTX 690 (at the time the highest spec card they sold). To make it identify as the Quado with same specs.

https://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippl...

AMD purchased ATI in 2006, and the brand hasn't been in use since 2010..

They are not part of mainline linux, so if you do install newer versions, there would be broken changes that you wait for Nvidia to fix or have to fix yourself.

I have the same confusion, although I will say the only time I've EVER had a problem with nvidia drivers it was when I installed it through the package manager.

When I install them myself by running the scripts that nvidia gives you, I've never had a problem with the drivers. I've always suspected that was the problem, the way the distro's package the drivers, rather than being a problem with the drivers themselves.

My experience with a 1060 on Ubuntu is that it was fairly buggy in the early days, and has gotten better.

I don't have too many problems now, but just recently I ran into trouble with any application that used OpenGL not working, and it went away when I rebooted.

In general I'd say they've done an okay job, but still I've seen enough bugs to say they have room for improvement.

I don't know how many of those bugs are Nvidia's fault explicitly; Linux is a bit of a wild west when it comes to software configuration, and they can't test everything or fix every buggy application.

The Linux drivers refuse to properly detect the supported resolutions on any of my monitors. They get the native resolution, plus 1024x768.

This is real frustrating when I want to play older games that only support 4:3 and 5:4 resolutions, because I have to knock them all the way down to 1024x768.

There's a roundabout way to manually add custom resolutions, but I've never gotten it to work with X. Maybe it would play nicer with Wayland, if Nvidia made any real effort to actually support it.

"Just works" before ticking a "Install privative driver", and then getting many bugs. Compared to AMD drivers that just works without additional installation, have far less errors and play well with the standards.

The igpus on the 10th gen intel desktop chips I've got have been working well without any hassles, I'm running manjaro kde (and previously kde neon) on a 10400 and a 9900k igpus in wayland, and they work great!

Can you give some more info -- like which WM do you use in particular?

i think the WM i'm using is kde plasma that comes with manjaro currently, i set the compositor to use opengl 3.1 using wayland from the plasma-session-wayland package

i'm using google chrome, vscode insiders and alacritty and vlc, and that's pretty much it, with very little problems, after i boot into wayland and launch chrome i get some stuttering on the shadows which goes away after a couple of seconds, but that's pretty much the only hassle

What package do you use for arch? Are you able to run wayland? What windowing system do you use?

I've just switched to manjaro kde and I'm having a blast using it every day for work, any tips on the nvidia drivers is appreciated. I have managed to brick my distro a few times trying to get it set up (and by brick, I mean getting it into a state that I can't figure out how to recover it from).

I wonder how many expensive gaming cards Nvidia has sold to programmers saying "Well, I can't really justify spending this much to play video games, but what if I want to train a DNN at home?"

Guilty as charged.

Also guilty, but then I did train a DNN and it worked really well so it was totally worth it.

What does that mean? Trained 1 DNN and it had good results so it's all worth it?

It has crossed my mind during my last GPU purchase

> One thing I'm curious about is the RTX IO feature. The slide said it supports DirectStorage for Windows, but is there an equivalent to this for Linux? I'm hoping someone with a little more insight or an Nvidia employee may have some more information.

I haven't been able to find any real technical details about what DirectStorage really is, but my expectations are that it will consist of:

1. An asynchronous IO API allowing for low-overhead submission of IO requests from the application to the kernel, including batch submissions and reaping of completion events.

2. Some provision for transparent compression offload, either to the GPU or to a CPU-based fallback

3. Optional support for peer-to-peer DMA transfers of data from SSD to the GPU's VRAM

Linux is already the gold standard for (1) with the relatively recent io_uring API, and has support for (3) to some extent (P2P DMA has been a fairly obscure feature until recently).

There are still some pretty big unanswered questions about DirectStorage. How well will it reduce the IO overhead that currently allows antivirus and other programs to hook into the IO stack? Will it be compatible with non-Microsoft NVMe drivers, including Intel's RST drivers that are commonly used for their software RAID? Microsoft doesn't seem to want to make that kind of information public this year.

There's a slightly more detailed blog post here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...

Yeah, I already read that. If you pay attention, you'll notice it talks a lot about the problem they're trying to solve, and very little about how exactly they're going about solving it. Partly because it's apparently still in flux, which calls into question what's going on with the storage API for the Xbox, which really should have been nailed down by now.

It's the same tech used by the next-gen consoles (e.g.: PS5).

Essentially, it's about streaming game textures directly into the GPU memory.

The idea is that this is highly asynchronous and parallel from the perspective of the CPU, so trying to do this through the "main game loop" would be an absolute nightmare to code at the scale we're talking about here. Think 50K IOPS sustained at 8GB/s with pretty hard real time guarantees.

Linux is the gold standard for (1)?

Windows NT 3.5 (1994) would beg to differ with its support for IO completion ports (IOCP). I think io_uring is more general and more flexible for the sort of M:N scheduling systems now commonly used in programming languages, but IOCP predates io_uring by 25 years!

The rest of your comment sounds right to me, there are unanswered questions about how DirectStorage interacts with filesystem filter drivers.

Being old isn't particularly interesting here. io_uring can do 2.5M IOPS per CPU core with a sufficiently fast SSD. I've never seen any suggestion that IO overhead on Windows can be cut down enough to get close to that. And if IOCP was actually good for this use case, Microsoft wouldn't be hyping a new DirectStorage API. (It might turn out that DirectStorage is new window dressing on top of IOCP, but I suspect they've had to cut stuff out of the existing IO stack to reduce overhead.)

I think my point was largely that Windows already has (1) from your list and it's already the gold standard on Windows, and has been available for some 25 years. I would be surprised if it wasn't part of the mechanism used in DirectStorage.

io_uring does have a more ergonomic and POSIX API, but that's because it's on Linux! Fundamentally they're both completion port based replacements to polling for IO events and they're both capable of high throughput and horizontal scaling.

Ok, the misunderstanding here may be that I was using "gold standard" as a superlative among async IO APIs in general, while you're using it as a superlative among a given platform's set of IO APIs, async or otherwise.

I was extremely (I think justifiably) skeptical of async I/O on Linux for the longest time but now I legitimately think with io_uring Linux is actually somehow the gold standard for (1). They really got their act together. io_uring is really good.

Don't buy it yet, usually oem versions are more optimised and better value overall.

But i must say 3070 is really tempting for $500 for someone who is not looking to upgrade.

Not at all. The 20 series has excellent founders cards.

I could be wrong - but I believe Nvidia bins the chips for Founders Edition cards

There's always a ton of speculation about it, I've seen the claim NVIDIA bins for FE cards and factory overclocked AIB cards together

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly.

On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)

What does it mean to bin a chip?

they cherry-pick their best silicon so you can run them at higher speeds if you're overclocking or lower voltage if you want cooler temperatures and less power consumption at stock speeds.

Basically, after the chips are manufactured, they're not 100% uniform. Some have better performance, some have worse.

In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.

chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.

I know for the 20 series Nvidia supplies AIB's like EVGA with binned chips too, higher end cards had GPU's with slightly different model numbers that typically clocked better. They probably do the same for all the different card makers.

That flow-through cooling looks like it would be really good though. I might go for the FE cards this time around.

I have a Micro-ATX case for my PC and am a little skeptical that flow-through would well for that form factor because the intakes are on the bottom of the card.

True - in my case I have intake fans at the bottom too so I was excited to see that

It will probably be fine. I've used powerful graphics cards in super-cramped ITX cases and didn't have a problem. I think people overestimate how much cooling these things really need.

Any temps below 80C at load are perfectly safe and shouldn't result in throttling -- the same is true for CPUs. If you aim for lower temps than 80C, you aren't going to get better performance, although lower temps are a good way to get your computer to run more quietly.

>If you aim for lower temps than 80C, you aren't going to get better performance

You're not directly going to get better performance, but you can run higher clocks for longer before throttling, leading to higher performance.

I don’t believe it, old reference fans were optimized for static pressure on server chassis and gaming cards optimize for low speed high volume airflow, I think.

I'm confused, wouldn't FE be considered OEM?

The terminology is a bit confusing: OEM in this context is referring to aftermarket (NVIDIA partners) cards. It's referred to as "OEM" because the aftermarket cards come from OEMs like Asus, EVGA, etc.

Now that the reference cards don't have the blower coolers they are a lot more tempting. I'd still wait for reviews to see how loud they are though.

Up to now, OEM/AIC/AIB cards had quieter cooling systems, but they also make you pay for the silly graphics, the RGB, etc. I don't think the overclocking ability is really that much better. A quiet reference design with a non-blower cooler and a good warranty is what I've always wanted.

Yeah, NVIDIA makes blower again. RTX 2000 FE lacks blower design.

It's disappointing for me. The 970 launched at $330. I bought my 1070 at the launch price of $400. The 3070 is $500. I don't like this trend.

A rough inflation guess is 330 six years ago is 363 today. The 3060, which is still a relative monster, will set you back 400.

My last gaming computer took me 9 years along with only an SSD addition, RAM upgrade, and video card change halfway through. It was only Microsoft Flight Simulator that made me jump up and damn... my timing was a just a little too early on the beefy video card.

How can you call the 3060 a monster when its specs haven't been released, let alone real benchmarks? For that matter the price isn't official either.

Am in the same situation, the 1080 is still holding up well, but the 3080 looks very tempting indeed.

Looking forward to some benchmarks that evaluate the difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0. Getting a new motherboard with PCIe 4.0 along with a CPU will up the cost considerably, so hopefully that can be avoided.

Also considering an upgrade to the Corsair RM1000x PSU which should be able to be totally silent even with the RTX 3080 according to https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7376/corsair-rm1000x-1000w....

UPDATE:

According to this answer, using PCIe 3.0 should not make a huge difference: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/iko4u7/geforce_rtx_...

I use an eGPU, so I have a 4x instead of a 16x PCIe 3.0 link with a 1080Ti and even that doesn't make much difference, some games blit/do more system <-> gpu transfers than others (APEX, I'm lookin at you) and there's a noticeable perf impact for the most part it's negligible. I wouldn't worry at all about PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0.

Same. In gaming and graphics benchmarks on my 1070Ti over Thunderbolt 3 (Hades Canyon Intel NUC), I've seen no more than a 10%-20% drop in frame rate vs. what I'd expect from equivalent benchmark results reported online, so I'd expect no material difference between PCIe 3.0 x16 and PCIe 4.0 x16 for typical gaming applications, and, from benchmark numbers I've seen, only a modest performance drop from PCIe 4.0 x16 to PCIe 3.0 x8.

This assumes, of course, that the PCIe lanes in question actually exist† and are dedicated to the card, and are not shared with another in-use device via a switch or similar chipset shenanigans.

Case in point: the only time I ever had performance problems with my eGPU setup was when attempting to do 4K HDMI output through a Blackmagic Decklink card while simultaneously using the 1070Ti for compute over the same (shared) Thunderbolt bus in DaVinci Resolve.

As far as I know, this would not typically be a problem with a single-GPU, non-Thunderbolt-connected desktop system, as desktop motherboards typically have at least one full-bandwidth x16 slot, which you'd almost always use for the GPU.

† Physical x16 slots can have fewer than sixteen connected PCIe lanes. For example, while my HP Z820 has four "x16" slots, only three have full bandwidth; the fourth slot supports x16 cards, but only at the speed of an x8 slot, because only eight of the slot's sixteen PCIe lanes are actually connected.

The major difference is offloading some of the load from the CPU when using the pci-e bus.

If you have a spare core not being used when playing a video game, it can be used which should make the difference between 3.0 and 4.0 somewhat indistinguishable.

You can find the information from multiple sources - IT review sites that performed the testing - that for current GPUs PCIe 4 x16 is not needed, you can use PCIe 3 x16 with negligible impact and even PCIe x8 with minimal impact.

There are also some sites that explains why large capacity power suppliers are a waste of money. Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_wtoCBahhM

Great to hear that PCIe 4 is not a necessity at this point.

About the PSU, for me the only reason to go with a 1000W PSU is that the fan will remain quiet with a GTX 1080 when idle and gaming as well. At least thats what I hope.

If the same is possible with the 3080 is more questionable, especially if the card draws 320W at all times.

That capability exists even on smaller power supplier, for example the Corsair RM-650 has it; powering the fan is done based on temperature (and that depends a lot on the load), not on the power supply max rating. This means you need to just add your max CPU consumption (not TDP, that is lower), GPU max consumption, the rest of the components and add a 200W reserve, not a 500W reserve.

PSU efficiency is low at the ends of the curve, underutilized (<20%) the efficiency can drop as low as 70%. The top (not peak) efficiency is somewhere in the 30-80% load zone, that is where you want to be.

I was under the impression that it was the power draw alone that decided when the fan kicked in. But it makes sense that the temperature also matters.

Based on that info and that the system will draw about 430W for CPU+GPU, it seems that the fanless Seasonic TX-700 is better suited.

It is quite expensive, but as someone who really hate unnecessary noise, it looks like a good choice.

Changing all the existing cables to a new PSU sucks though :p

> I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers

That's something I've never had a problem with when it comes to NV. And I've been using their cards for years for combined compute/display purposes.

>> My day job is primarily ML as well, so I might just go for the 3090. 24 GB of memory is a game changer for what I can do locally. I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers.

What is your ML dev environment like?

We have a small team of 7, so after a lot of bureaucratic navigation I got us custom built desktops for local experimentation with 2080 Ti's and for the rest we use your typical cloud providers. Personally, I'm partial to GCP, because of the TPU support and BigQuery, but AWS is fine too.

Interesting, thanks.

> One thing I'm curious about is the RTX IO feature.

Me too, but for a different reason: I wonder if it can work with BitLocker if you're using software encryption (as hardware encryption is transparent enough that the drive basically locks and unlocks).

It would still save the CPU cost of decompression but it'd have to go through RAM for (AES-NI accelerated) CPU decryption either way. Maybe at that point RAM speed and latencies start to matter more. Or the feature turns off altogether. Definitely something to test.

> I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers. Ubuntu has done some great work making things easier and just work,

This has been my experience. Ubuntu "just works". What would get better with what you propose? (speaking from ignorance)

Weyland still doesn't work with nv drivers, so you get to choose between a reasonable desktop display substrate and full graphics acceleration.

KDE and Gnome Support Nvidia drivers on wayland.

They support nouveau. Wayland doesn't support EGS, no matter what DE you stick in front, so nv drivers are out.

(Nvidia cards have two drivers on Linux, nouveau, the open-source, slow, and incompatible-with-Quadro ones, and NV, the binary blob shipped by Nvidia that people take religious exception to.)

Gnome supports Wayland over EGS just not by default. I tried it out a few months ago and while it "works" it was somewhat buggy and I just went back to X.

What's EGS in this context? I'll take it it's not the Epic Game Store, and searching for Wayland EGS only lands on this HN comment.

EGLStreams, one graphics API. The alternative is graphics buffer manager with kernel mode settings.

Gnome and KDE on Wayland support both EGS and GBM, and they have for a while, so the nvidia binary driver "just works" with either of them.

Yeah, Wayland is one of the main issue here. Things are going really well generally speaking with the Wayland transition, but Nvidia is single-handedly delaying the wide-spread transition from X to Wayland across most distros, which is super unfortunate, because it's a very important part of a desktop Linux experience. Using Wayland day to day on my XPS 13 with regular Intel integrated graphics is great in terms of perf and battery life. There's a much larger conversation to be had about X vs Wayland, but broadly speaking Wayland is just better and not bogged down by design decisions made 20 or 30 years ago.

The other key benefit would be driver management. Updating your drivers right now can be a nightmare. If the drivers are open sourced and upstreamed into the kernel this becomes a non-issue. I do understand why Nvidia doesn't want to do that though. A lot of their lead right now is not just hardware based, but software based. They have a choke-hold on the ML ecosystem and it's a huge cash cow for them. Giving away that secret sauce in their drivers, so that AMD could make their cards seamlessly compatible would probably be a huge mistake from a business perspective for Nvidia.

> Giving away that secret sauce in their drivers, so that AMD could make their cards seamlessly compatible would probably be a huge mistake from a business perspective for Nvidia.

I've seen this argument a lot but never from the ML perspective - and I don't think it makes sense with ML.

Nivida's advantage is ML is CUDA and cuDNN, and the huge set of tools built on them. These aren't the driver, but a layer above it.

I don't really understand the "secret sauce" argument for the drivers at all, but I assumed it applied to gaming somehow. I can't think of how it applies to ML though.

PTX is on the driver level, and it took NVidia several years effort to make their cards properly map into C++ memory module.

Intel and AMD despite their FOSS support, actually only do open what they feel like.

nvidia drivers work just fine on wayland with kde and gnome, both of which support EGL and GBM.

> My day job is primarily ML as well, so I might just go for the 3090. 24 GB of memory is a game changer for what I can do locally. I really just wish Nvidia would get its shit together with Linux drivers.

You might be better off waiting for Quadro.

GeForce, from NVIDIA's perspective, is the consumer line. The drivers are focused on getting the best possible performance for gamers (on Windows you'll see a big deal made of "Game-ready" drivers) and the hardware is intended for desktop usage, i.e. a couple of hours of gaming. GeForce hardware isn't intended for long-running jobs like ML and the drivers aren't stability-focused.

That's not to say that you can't train ML models on a GeForce card or that the GeForce drivers will lead to constant crashing or anything, just that NVIDIA isn't focused on this for GeForce.

Quadro and Tesla on the other hand are all about reliability. They're intended for use in servers and workstations where they're subject to all-day (Quadro) or 24/7 (Tesla) load. The drivers are focused on making sure things don't break.

Though I think the 3090 is intended to be the successor to the previous-generation Titan, so it could be that NVIDIA has different ideas about what goes where these days.

ahem yes. It seems like your overlord won't pay you for this into the future.

There are indeed driver differences but I have been running long-lived, sometimes month-lived ML workloads on GTX and RTX cards for years. I've never had any stability issues.

You are more or less buying into their marketing, and paying 100-250% price premiums for a "Quadro" or "Tesla".

> the hardware is intended for desktop usage, i.e. a couple of hours of gaming.

Tons of people have been flooring previous generation of cards 24/7 for months with compute workloads, and not nearly all of them were using watercooling. Those cards are still fine.

ECC memory might be an argument though, for CAD/CAE type of work. Doubt ML cares about a few bitflips.

Tons of researchers and companies use the GeForce line for ML. It’s the reason for the infamous “no use in data centers” addition to the EULA, and potentially part of the reason for the switch from blowers, which made it feasible to stuff 4-16 1080Ti’s in a single case.

Having gone through some hellish months on a 5700xt, AMD isn't any better than Nvidia on the Linux front, though since late January it was relatively stable (on beta linux kernel, which meant I couldn't use KVM/Virtualbox reasonably).

Personally, looking at the RTX 3070, for 1440p, but I'm not doing anything other than some casual gaming.

What problems did you have with the 5700XT? Been pondering buying one for a mixed gaming/work Linux station.

Just so you know, AMD is also releasing a GPU update this fall. Could be that drivers take a moment to stabilize again, but at least the old models should drop in price if you're not looking to be on bleeding edge.

Yeah, I'm hoping they're more stable out of the gate... from October through early January the navi cards were problematic to say the least.

Kind of works in kernel, update breaks it, switch distros to supported distro, load official driver package, update breaks it... switch to beta/bleeding kernel, graphics work, but kvm/virtualbox completely borked. I may do a clean install with PopOS 20.10 when it drops, which should be well supported in kernel and get virtualization support back in the box.

I'd give it a few weeks, should be able to get one used around $200 after the rtx 3000 availability shakes out. A GTX 1080 is around the same performance and pricing will be a little lower even.

Since January it's been pretty stable, I've been on the beta kernel releases though.. when say 20.10 ubuntu and derivatives drop, should be using a kernel that's stable for the 5700xt.

I've been working more on my Windows drive, using WSL2 + Docker Desktop (wsl2 option) for the past few months though, which I've been surprisingly happy with.

Here in Eastern Europe retailers are surprisingly stubborn and almost never drop prices of obsolete generations of tech. :(

I'd also love to read a guide about WSL2 + Docker.

You have to be running Windows 10 version 2004 update or newer. There are lots of walkthroughs, but you install "Ubuntu" or another distro for under WSL via the Windows store.

If you install docker desktop with WSL2 installed, there's a configuration setting to "use wsl2" it may still be labelled beta as a feature. But it does work better.

I'm using the new Windows Terminal, and my default is set to WSL2 Ubuntu... for all intent and purpose, I launch VS Code from a wsl2 prompt/directory and it's connected into "linux" ... my terminal and code terminal/directory are in linux, and I use it like any linux distro from that pov. The desktop is windows, but almost everything I work in is via Linux under WSL2.

Which monitor? I was looking at the Samsung G9.

The EVE Spectrum[1]. I actually pre-ordered a while back, so got it for less than what it's priced at now. Their first project had some issues with delivery, but they seem to have done a great job with this one and I'm cautiously optimistic.

[1]: https://evedevices.com/pages/full-specs

Hm, Eve as a whole feels pretty suspect after what they did with the V. I wonder if they'll really ship these this time, but I doubt it.

Yeah, I read the stories, but I also read their side of the story and it seemed like they got pretty screwed with the vendor.

Like I said, I'm cautiously optimistic and I'm also lucky enough that losing out on my $100 deposit isn't a financial issue for me.

The G9 and G7 seem to suffer from the same problem that previous VA adaptive sync monitors had, i.e. brightness depends on frame rate, so the screen flickers with changing framerate.

In addition to that they seem to have some issues with their firmware trampling over its own memory, causing glitch artifacts and such. I suspect they'll fix that through a firmware update.

I wish they'd get their drivers sorted out too! I'm typing on a computer with a 2080 ti, but instead I'm using the igpu for kde wayland (which works perfectly fine).

Which monitor is it? I am not aware of any high-refresh IPS screens, most seem to be TN or VA.

They're all very new. The Eve Spectrum[1] is the one I ordered.

[1]https://evedevices.com/pages/full-specs

> 24 GB of memory is a game changer

a little confused here, I see Dell offering machines with cards up to 48 GB, so 24 GB seems quite nice, but not game changing.

The difference is the Quadro RTX 8000 is $5500 (vs the 3090’s $1500 price), and the Quadro has less than half of the CUDA cores that the 3090 does.

You can buy two of the 3090’s for almost half the price of the Quadro and have 4x the processing power.

EDIT: looks like I'm not fully correct here - nvidia changed how they measure cores: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ikok1b/explaining...

Still great for the price, but not double the power necessarily.

I thought quadro sacrifices speed to get accuracy, which matters for modelling/rendering but not ML (and games)

Isn’t this just Single vs. Double vs. Quad-precision in IEEE-754 numbers - or is it something else?

Do they round-off 32-bit floats at 24-bits or something?

Matters for CAD but rendering these days most are just piling machines full of gaming GPUs and rendering on CUDA.

my reading of the article was that this model is memory bound, not compute bound

10496 CUDA cores plus 24GB should be pretty good for ML

edit: Wrong! Ignore/downvote!

> 10496 CUDA cores

Not quite. 5248 cores, each supporting double fp32.

But they clearly state in the specs (for 3080): 8704 NVIDIA CUDA® Cores

And 10496 for 3090.

Correct!

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ikok1b/explaining...

Seems it is half the cores but double the fp instructions.

The spec talks cuda cores which is their inventive unit of measure.

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