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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place

Maybe for Windows, but the same cannot be said of Linux or macOS, where AMD's choice to open-source their drivers has led to these OSes having great support; while Nvidia, having to support their own closed-source drivers, seemingly hasn't had the bandwidth to get their drivers for these OSes up to par.

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Not really, drivers for Navi were equally bad on Linux. Second thing is that you need to wait several months before open source driver is stable, first months you have to use latest kernel + mesa-git. On the other hand, you can use Nvidia blob from day one.

This. I've already decided my next GPU will be AMD regardless of if it's competitive at the top end in terms of performance. I am so sick of nVidia's Linux driver bullshit that I cannot wait to drop them. I don't game that much anymore anyway.

AMD is great for gaming on Linux, especially with projects like radv and ACO.

I'm not super interested in Linux gaming, I just want my desktop to be usable.

Honest question: If you're not interested in gaming, why even get a discrete GPU and not an integrated one? Are you interested in using it for other purposes?

I dual boot Windows for gaming. I work and code on Linux, except my monitor setup + nvidia graphics card results in a virtually unusable desktop. Integrated graphics can't run multiple 4k screens very well, if at all.

I do all my gaming on Linux and AMD works very well for it.

I'm not the author of the previous comments but I use Linux, not interested in gaming, and I have a dedicated GPU (2080ti). Mostly for working with Blender and Houdini, where the integrated one would work as well as using the CPU, at least for the workloads I'm dealing with, so having a dedicated GPU for both simulations and rendering helps a lot to speed up the workflows.

I can answer this question from my own perspective, at least. CPUs with integrated graphics are not as fast as standalone historically. Compare say, a ryzen 3600 to a 3400G.

Passmark below:

3400G: 9425

3600: 17850

for fun

1600: 12444

Linux support exists, but is a royal pain. With my 5500XT, even on Arch linux it wasn't properly supported unless I compiled a few things from Git.

I applaud the open source effort, but let's not pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.

Their Windows drivers are a pain as well, to be honest. I've had more than a few blue screens from various versions of their drivers over the last few years.

And you can undervolt your AMD card with the open source drivers to improve efficiency and gain performance at the same time.

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