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Comment by armatav | Hacker News Reader

It is not on par at all - my 5600 got annihilated by driver issues.

AMD has incredible CPUs, but just buy an Nvidia GPU - especially if you are using linux.

Nvidia has subpar support for Wayland on Linux because it uses its own EGLStreams buffer API instead of the standard GBM buffer API, which is better-supported. Both AMD and Intel use GBM.

Also, the open source driver for Nvidia (nouveau) has incredibly poor performance compared to Nvidia's proprietary driver, and lacks essential features such as reclocking for recent hardware generations:

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html

AMD's and Intel's open source drivers are their primary offerings on Linux and have good performance across all hardware generations.

Intel has actually gone downhill lately, especially for prior generations. I've had to live with 5 or so years of tearing with multi-monitor support on Ivy Bridge, and even single monitor tears inexplicably with some software (that shouldn't). The Intel Xorg driver is unmaintained and the generic modesetting driver doesn't work quite as well. When I first got my Ivy Bridge system, triple head mode didn't work for a while either, so it's not like they have great support when the hardware is current either.

I've switched to AMD now and things are much better. Go with AMD.

I've found the wayland server to be a great experience with intel—the only weird bits I've seen is full-screen noise on firefox and poor support for high dpi, the latter of which is even shittier under X11. The server is really very usable nowadays.

AMD's ok if you have the room for the discrete card, but I wish they would invest more in integrated on-board chips.

This doesn't apply if you want to run CUDA-dependent software. I've generally gone for Nvidia for my personal machine since Torch has behaved oddly on AMD cards in the past.

It's true that Nvidia doesn't support Wayland properly, but that's not really an issue in my opinion. Wayland still has its own problems that mean switching from X11 isn't viable yet.

What issues have you had with Wayland? Switching to it has given me a tear free experience on both AMD & Intel laptops, besides that it performs similar to X11.

My main problem with it is limited software support. Xmonad isn't available and as far as I can tell what support exists for screen recording and screenshots is half-baked at best. I haven't seen anywhere near enough problems with X11 to make switching window managers worth it, and the screen recording thing would be a massive pain to work around.

> tear free

> 5 or so years of tearing

I know what people are referring to, but a less geeky person might come away from this thinking people get very emotional about bad Linux graphics drivers.

Although your argument is valid, are we talking about CUDA? Obviously CUDA is an NVIDIA thing under all platforms, right? I don't think anyone would buy AMD with the intention of running CUDA.

Regarding GPUs and how good they work under Linux, computing on GPUs is only a part of the discussion I would argue...

The Xorg modesetting driver works quite reliably on Intel in my experience.

The SNA acceleration architecture in the Intel Xorg driver was a disaster in terms of correctness and stability. When SNA appeared as an option it initially seemed quite fast, but didn't take long to reveal it was also quite broken vs. UXA.

I used to explicitly use UXA but for the last 5-10 years simply using modesetting has been the way to go.

Personally I think you're conflating Xorg and kernel driver issues. Xorg is basically unmaintained in general now and unfortunately SNA was the last major development in that context for the Intel driver, and it was not good.

I'm still on an Intel system (skylake) and my experience is similar to yours. 5+ years of bugs and crashes, tearing, multi-monitor headaches and general instability.

Eagerly awaiting the new AMD hardware.

Modern AMD GPUs work better on linux than nvidia. No tearing, multi-monitor works, and vulkan is very smooth. Nvidia is actually less stable, and has some peculiar quirks, such as needing composite manager running to get rid of tearing, spotty multi-monitor support, etc..

You are dismissing people saying they ARE having issues with AMD on Linux. In fact my AMD card does not do multi-monitor, and in this thread I'm not the only one that has multi-monitor issues on AMD.

Which card are you using? I'm aware the older cards are still bad. Especially if you still need fglrx. In my personal experience, the modern AMD GPUs on linux is first time graphics have worked reasonably well on linux. Even intel drivers are riddled with bugs and instability (not to mention they still don't even do gallium). GMA 3650 (powersgx based) being the most infamous worst driver ever.

A 5500 XT bought in June, so not old at all. I've heard the opposing argument, that since it's a relatively new card (out since Dec 2019?) I should expect some bugs, which is insane one year later. It's actually unusable, I have to log into my machine via SSH to restart it, or force reboot. It might break after 30 minutes or 3 days, when idle or busy.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929

AMD developers in that thread are chasing their tails and still haven't figured out why so many cards are having issues, and why other aren't, but as a consumer, that's really not inspiring at all.

Funny, I have 5600 XT (Sapphire Pulse) and it runs like dream. The out of box experience with Linux has been very good. Note that some of the aftermarket cards are actually bad and the instability might not be software related. Before 5600 XT, I used R9 290, and while it did require some tweaks to enable all features (due to being older card), it still ran relatively stable and in general was better experience than any nvidia card I had used in past.

This guy is having the same issues I'm having with a 5600. Multi-monitor, entirely new computer built a couple months ago.

Randomly locks up, random black screen, random rainbow colors all over my monitors.

With my new Nvidia 2060 which I bought to replace it; nothing. No issues. Works just fine on Manjaro.

For whatever reason, the AMD cards just get clapped on Linux.

My experience with linux is that the nvidia drivers and support are the worst of the bunch, and if I had a nickle every time I could trace a kernel panic through their driver I'd get a very nice lunch. Their popularity seems to be driven primarily by exclusive access to CUDA APIs and windows gaming. Nouveau is OK for accelerated 2d but is hardly in the same ballpark as the AMD drivers.

That said I just picked up a quadro (not my choice, came with a prebuilt NUC) and I've been pleased to find that it "just works" on freebsd (I use it to realtime transcode video), so clearly great experiences are possible and I don't want to be needlessly harsh.

Personally, I'm dying for a discrete intel card. I can't recall any hiccups with intel chipsets, ever, and that matters WAY more to me than raw performance.

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