Hacker News Reader

Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com