AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.
Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.
I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.
But the Steamdeck uses very much a full-blown Arch-derived Linux distro. So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
The fact that AMD landed on the Steamdeck vs. NVIDIA or Intel is noteworthy. Their continued investment in mainline Linux support has clearly paid off.
The Deck uses a special, low power (specifically targeting ~9W), graphics heavy AMD SoC. It was actually the first of a new laptop CPU line that AMD seemingly canceled:
https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-2021-2022-roadmap-part...
AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time. Intel and Nvidia had nothing comparable for Valve to use. In fact, the successor to the Deck chip is kinda an existential problem, as AMD's CPU-heavy laptop line (including the Z1) is less suitable.
Mind, proton does work well with NVIDIA, but my understanding is that AMD gets the most testing.
Or contract Centaur before they went defunct, maybe?
Both these things would be quite out-of-character for Nvidia.
They have been there pretty consistently, for example they’ve been the SoC provider for a few generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles, now.
One thing thats under-appreciated is the immense design/tape out cost (9 figures these days, maybe more?) of a fully custom chip. That is a huge flat expense, hence one does not simply make a custom design unless the volume (or margin) is absolutely enormous.
AMD/Nvidia/Intel can't just casually crank out an APU for Valve, as one might think. I'm not even sure MS/Sony can justify a die shrink this generation... Heck, maybe the PS6 will run commodity PC hardware.
Note, we're seeing a lot of Chinese handhelds using 7840s already that while a bit behind at 10W, start beating the Steam Deck's performance (sometimes dramatically) at 15W+. Personally, I'd be pretty excited for a Strix Point handheld next year - AMD seems like they're finally getting serious on the iGPU side of things again (with Meteor Lake looking to be competitive).
[1] https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/03/05/van-gogh-amds-steam-de...
It is not. Its a distinct die from the Zen2/3 laptop parts.
If AMD was going to continue the Deck APU line, we would have seen Dragon Crest by now... But its not there, and the Z1 is in its place.
Again, I reiterate, taping out a chip is massively expensive. Valve cannot afford a custom die, they are stuck with what AMD has at the moment when they need it... Though if AMD starts tiling their laptop APUs, Valve might be able to tweak the CPU/GPU config.
Since all the details are NDA'd, I guess we'll have to disagree on the economics, but "tweaking CPU/GPU config" is the whole point of AMD's Semi-Custom Solutions group and if they can't handle delivering a solution for a product that has at least $2B in sales, then I don't know what customers they're supposed to serve (tape-out costs are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as you're imagining I suspect, when reusing existing IP blocks). But we can revisit in a few years and see.
It depends on what you’re using this data for.
If you are a game developer deciding what platforms to support then Steamdeck is fully distinct from Linux, imho. Support Steamdeck, it’s likely worth it (depends on type of game)!
However supporting Steamdeck may not require a native Linux port. It turns out the best way to support Linux May infact be to simply use the Win32 API!
And even if you do support Steamdeck with a native Linux port it may not be worth your time to try and support Ubuntu and a billion flavors of Linux that are each broken in different ways.
Supporting Linux clients beyond Steamdeck is likely not worth it for most games.
Source: have shipped games with Linux support. Was extremely painful and not worth it.
The reason that "supporting Linux is hard" is the combinatorial matrix of broken ass shit. Supporting a single configuration is easy.
Proton/WINE works well on Steamdeck. It gets updated regularly by Valve for specific games when it doesn't. It is not as reliable for random gamer's random ass frankenstein setup.
If I were shipping a game today I would say “I support Steamdeck”. If any users complained about it not working on their particular Linux machine I would say “you’re on your own, good luck!”.
I would proudly advertise “Steamdeck support” and I would definitely never claim to “support Linux”.
IIRC for my Linux project something like 40% of support tickets were from the 1% of Linux users. Give or take. Never again!
So, sort of like Windows?
Just not that that major in the overall scheme of things.
FWIW Linux is easy to support if all you want to do is run a headless server on a single distro. Supporting more distros may require a little bit of dependency hell bullshit, but it's doable.
What's a bloody nightmare is graphics and sound and the infinitely large matrix of janky environments gamers have.
the infinitely large matrix of janky environments gamers have.
But why does having anything "GNU-like" determine whether or not something is Linux? Surely the fact that it is literally running Linux makes it Linux more than some related software (GNU) not being used.
I'll take my downvotes here for being an ass, but on a forum that loves being pedantic, I legitimately expect better. Android is Linux. Typically with an outdated kernel, without root, with a locked bootloader, and without the GNU tooling, but it's pretty hard to argue Android's not Linux.
Ah, like my Pixel 2. Respectfully, you might be on the wrong forum (and possibly the worst one outside XDA) to say "Most people here do not, and never did, have root access on their Android handsets".
If your distinction for what makes a Linux system a Linux system, is root access, recognize that many, many people here have met and cleared that bar.
So I hope to soon join that 1.5%, and with the direction Windows seems to be going, I expect a lot more people will do the same.
- Android isn't quite Linux
- A good number if not the majority of 'mobile games' are gachas/cow-clickers.
At least to me, it's a bit like lumping old folks who play at churches into a 'Gamblers that visit casinos once a week' metric.
If we're being pedantic, let me be clear that Android is Linux. It just doesn't use the traditional userland, mostly implemented by GNU. So it's Linux but not GNU/Linux.
> Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
also, 'gaming' (union of pc and console) and 'mobile gaming' are significantly different demographics
If you are going to write GNU/Linux, be consistent with its usage.
Linux is the kernel. My OS is Ubuntu, not just Linux. Android is also Linux.
Gnu = coreutils + POSIX + gcc + others;
Linux = the kernel
Slight aside, but in the past I've worked at some of those bingo halls that drew the sunday after-church old folks crowd. They were some of the most hardcore gamblers I have ever seen. Gods dandelions these ladies weren't.
There is GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd and Google/Linux.
If not indicated otherwise Linux is refers to GNU/Linux. Like America refers to the United States of America. Android refers to an incompatible custom userland by Google (anti GPL, closed-source PlayServices) and a usually heavily patched Linux-Kernel with many closed-source modules. Looking at Android 13 it is using an old 4.x Linux-Kernel as base.
Probably neither Google nor the FSF like that usage of terms?
That being said. I’m playing with Linux :)
That's vaporware, never used by anyone for anything useful.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn't written by me.
Here's the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused... < original copypasta>
The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.
We don't use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.
I haven't gone back to trying linux as desktop since pop_os bricked my Dell XPS (even bios recovery doesn't work, it's completely bricked by some UEFI extension or something that pop rammed onto it).
Before that just getting multiple monitors to work consistently/each in their own specific resolution was an absolute nightmare.
The SD is really what Linux should be targeting: "it just works" but if you want, you can crack it open and change what you want. Linux is mostly still a pain in the butt to get up & running, plug monitors & other devices in and just have the damn thing work.
Let alone all of the _choices_: distro, window manager, audio manager, etc, etc. Nobody _cares_. That's why it's not been year of the Linux desktop yet; you install Windows or you buy a Macbook and you get Windows or MacOS. Try to decide which window manager to use based on the internet's option; you'll find forums & forums like HN of people bitching over which WM is superior etc.
Most don't do significant PC gaming, right?
Just browsing the web and sharing files, right?
Hmmm.... Many will just get the millenial in the family to install Ubuntu or mint and be done with it..
At least that's what has consistently happened in my family, with people rarely if ever going back to windows (without any real tech support, it "just keeps working").
I am sure Valve collects way more than they let on. Linux gaming is at a good place. However, I really wish AMD would release their CPU and GPU control software for Linux. Running newer AMF cards is painful because the stock BIOS settings are anything but sane. Gotta burn power to win benchmarks...
So, you do agree that it's not hard data? Not sure what made you think I am "complaining" about the survey. Just pointing out it does not represent the full picture. It's supposedly random and voluntary.
Would you personally use the survey for actual real world research? Not talking about phoronix articles and blogs. Say, you are a marketing guy and the company you work for asks you to make predictions.
Personally I would not. And that is the essence of what I said.
That's probably true. Now the question is, how many PC gamers use Steam and how many don't.
And this is one big important piece of data I don't have.
Recent enough I still remember being mildly annoyed as I went to opt out. Again.
I'll be getting a Linux rig of some sort. And it won't just be for gaming, it will be for running and training local LLMs, which is far more brutal on the hardware than any games I've seen; I can still play most titles on my 1440p screen with my current "potato."
I've been running Microsoft operating systems for decades: Windows, and DOS before that since DOS 3.3. With all the attention sinks stuck into the new Windows (pops on the menu, pops from the dock, ads everywhere on my machine) it's time to leave it. The two viable alternatives are Mac OS and Linux. Work has me on Mac, but the hardware I want to run... Linux is the right choice. I'll game on the system I have.
I have to wonder how many PC gamers will follow suit as they get older.
Most of the systems I've been pricing out for Linux desktops are AMD Threadripper builds. Intel Xeons would be better for AI workloads, but they're way more expensive.
I, like you, switched from windows to Linux for gaming. This is the first year I haven’t owned a windows machine. End of an era.
I don’t miss it at all.
Future is here!
Instead that there is a need to fix something special in many games, we can make many games working by fixing selected few entities.
EAC has already support for linux, so it should not be impossible.
The proprietary nvidia driver situation is unfortunate, and if you’re sufficiently driven off by it, ROCm can work, sometimes, eventually. But do consider the effort and time it’ll cost.
I got a Stable Diffusion thing up and running locally on a relatively old AMD RX 580 with 8GB of memory, and default settings of 512x512 with 10 (I think) passes, and it takes about 10 minutes to generate an image. On a similarly aged Nvidia 1060 with 6GB of memory that a colleague of mine uses for their local Stable Diffusion instance, it takes about 20 seconds to generate an image.
I don't know how apples and oranges this comparison is, my OS is Linux and his is Windows, for example, but 10 minutes versus 20 seconds is, for me, a massively disappointing difference.
I'm sure the gap has decreased in the intervening 6-7 years, but I don't know how much - such that I'd be opting for a second hand Nvidia over a new AMD (and I philosophically prefer AMD).
This may be a worthwhile read if you're looking to squeeze the most performance: https://timdettmers.com/2023/01/30/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...
It's still a pain in other ways. AMD does not support ROCm on consumer-grade GPUs, it only "happens to work". I had to explicitly install the 3.10 python interpreter and use an older torch version, because seemingly, the newer ROCm releases do not support the RX5700 XT. Also ROCm only works on Linux.
My experience with a RX6800 was that compiling ROCm for myself for use with Pytorch just worked, though from reading online it's clear that's a rarity. Current gen cards apparently don't even work.
I would pay good money for a Windows version that had a more professional and consistent interface (Win 2K comes to mind, but Win 7 interface was still OK) no advertisement inside the OS, no telemetry, automatic update notification but manual installation, no unexplained HDD usage when idle that goes away as soon as I open the system monitor, WSL support.
Closest thing is LTSC but it is discouraged and hard to legally buy.
Linux can do all of this. Compatibility with games is good enough and better in some edge cases. KVM performance running a VM is good enough for running MS Office for work, and still a better experience than in bare metal as you can limit core usage and the computer will run cooler and use less power.
I built dozens of gaming desktops as a kid and young adult, but lately the time demands of adulthood means it's hard to keep up with the latest trends. Like you I got sick of fighting Windows just to launch Steam. But I also had numerous bad experiences with desktop Linux, and with not wanting to deal with Proton and Wine. When I want to relax I just want to get in a quick game for an hour or two, not go through a ton of driver updates etc.
To that end, GeForce Now has been... no pun intended... game changing. It works miraculously well, and has almost top of the line hardware. Paired with my ultrawide QHD screen, most games run beautifully. Shooters are out due to the input lag (small but definitely noticeable) but all the other genres feel fantastic. No fan noise, no heat, no giant tower taking up space, no worrying about upgrades... It's an amazing service at a terrific price point. I have a Mac but just plug in a Windows keyboard and mouse and it works flawlessly. Same with an Xbox controller.
People pooh poohed cloud gaming for so long, but these days it's so easy and seamless I'm honestly worried about the future of the gaming PC market. Nvidia seems well on their way to providing data center and AI cards and just renting games as a service. (Honestly, that's fine with me...).
1. Provide great value to the user while you are weak. Provide them a great deal and a disproportionate amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
2. Provide great value to your corporate partners once you become stronger than your consumers can organise against. Provide your corporate partners a huge amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
3. Take all surplus value for yourself once you're stronger than your corporate partners.
Cloud gaming is at stage 1.
I have seen this too many times at this point of my life to ever trust a good deal like this again.
Investing in things you own is an investment in yourself.
Subscriptions are signing up to be a tenant.
These are experiences that you go through and move on from, not heirlooms you keep. If you absolutely must play old games, they'll likely become either abandonware for emulators or remastered in 16k a few years from now.
You can go to great lengths to horde hardware and your own DRM free copies of games if that's your thing. Me, I'd rather just rent them from Steam while they're on sale for a few bucks, play them on hardware someone else maintains, and then forget about them. I'll never be able to keep up with all the great new releases in a lifetime anyway.
There are network effects help the companies from phase 1 to phase 2.
Ultimately there's an inertia in human decision making that means we almost always stick around longer than we should when we are being taken advantage of.
I would say that it's not worth the hassle of creating the hassle of escaping.
To each their own.
I feel like a combination of a few comments here. Itching to put together something that can bring justice to Zelda and tinker with AI
Apparently there is a way to stream games from your own machine similar to GeForce now. It's built into their GPUs -- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/nvidias-gamestream-is...
There are also services like Shadow that just rent you a GPU enabled Windows box, and you can run whatever emulator on there you want. It's cheaper than renting GPU hours from the enterprise providers (who mostly target AI workloads, I guess?)
Stadia seemed perfect for a casual gamer like me, but it had so few games at launch and I knew better than to buy into a Google consumer product. I have a MacBook, but using it to game on my TV would be a wonky setup.
Game Pass Cloud does work on some smart TVs, mostly the latest ones from Samsung so if you got one of those then you don't even need a box. Amazon Luna is the same. Samsung TV.
Since all the actual gaming hardware is in the cloud, all you need is a device that can output the frame rate and resolution (and maybe HDR) you want, which should be easy enough to find.
Honestly it can play anything I can throw at it. Including FFXIV which has zero official Linux support. And it might play even better than it does on Windows.
I wish I had migrated way earlier.
I also use Linux exclusively, and play games on Steam using Proton (which works great for modern games. I do single player games though)
However, no idea why there would be a correlation between Linux Gaming and AMD: I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
I had no problems using Steam with the Intel CPU before that. But I find it wrong of Intel to not support AVX-512 in consumer CPUs (and having efficiency cores in my desktop PC is not something that excites me, and it's because of those that they dropped AVX-512), while AMD embraced it. If new Intel CPUs would have been simply like the i9-11900 but better (in a different way than the efficiency cores, more like faster, more performance cores, more SIMD etc...), I'd probably just have kept getting Intel ones out of habit.
I do my part not to give Apple money, but as Ford Prefect said about foie gras:
“You can’t care about every damn thing.”
EDIT: Ohh CPU not GPU. Oh well enjoy the joke
I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
As someone with a 5900x I wish I had picked a more efficient cpu. Do consider idle and low usage power draw. My room turns into an oven even just watching YouTube.
Personally, I've found over the past few years that AMD parts tend to have better perf/watt than Intel parts for both laptops and desktops and I think most benchmarks tend to corroborate that experience: https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-7600-ryzen-7-770...
Someone mentioned Eco mode (which is easy if your BIOS supports it) - another option is futzing with PBO2 Curve Optimizer. Most chips can support a -10 on all cores but lots of people run up to -20 or even -30. This can make a pretty huge difference in temps/wattage. I lowered my CPU temps by >10C w/ no performance loss on my 5950X. You can also set the PPT to whatever max power you want to use. Here's a guide if you're going to explore some that more: https://skatterbencher.com/amd-precision-boost-overdrive-2/
(BTW, monitors will get you. With my monitors on reading HN, I'm burning 400W!)
At least this heat prepared me for summer :D
They bin CCDs for performance (max attainable frequency, thermal efficiency, etc) and include a good one and a not-so-good one on a CPU.
I got a 5950x a couple years ago and it's quite well known in the AMD space.
Intel's "efficiency cores" are almost the exact same thing - cheaper lamer cores to keep core count higher.
Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
To echo Linus Torvalds, and for good reason, fuck Nvidia
Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.
It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.
I took an NVME out of an Intel machine, threw it into an AMD machine, booted it, and everything just worked, graphics included. No weird network drivers to track down, sound card drivers, proprietary graphics or even xf86- stuff needed.
But it's still a pretty huge step in the right direction, even though it won't be as nice as AMD's fully open source and upstreamed driver.
That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It's great to be free from the endless annoyances that came with Nvidia's drivers.
Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.
AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
In my opinion an open-source driver not written by Nvidia and an Ubuntu ISO not packaged by Nvidia aren't indicators of Nvidia "just work"ing or not. There are many distros where Nvidia drivers come installed out of the box.
(where I can help it. Mobile is obviously a forced-obsolescence dumpster fire)
Then this opinion can be discarded as not grounded in reality. In order to run pytorch at high speed I need to do... basically nothing. It just works.
Many things can be said about ROCm support for 7900XT, none of them are positive. "It just works" drivers from AMD come several months too late.
nvidia driver on the contrary has always been reliable
The experience is different for everyone it seems.
I can play almost all single player games, whether they officially support proton or not; the only major game I have been unable to play (despite following all instructions online) is Gris.
This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.
For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
An earlier card will use radeon and be easy to setup, a later one will use amdgpu and be easy to set up. That generation takes a bit of work.
But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works.
I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.
All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.
Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).
> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).
Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.
Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.
I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.
I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.
edit: for some more context - I have tried a linux desktop about once a year every year for the last decade. Every time I've bounced hard due to issues on a variety of hardware - intel only, intel CPU + nvidia GPU, intel CPU + AMD GPU, AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU, etc. Last year (feb 2022 or so) is the first time I've made it work for me for the long term, so maybe it's just that in that time it's finally got to a good point? :)
I think issues exist on both sides, you're just picking examples that work for your argument
Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.
Nvidia has excellent Linux drivers.
Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen.
Now I buy AMD.
Chrome and other stuff still don't work great but is that NVIDIA's fault? Honest question, I don't know.
Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows.
Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux
Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow.
> The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish).
I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence.
I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.
How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
I've had zero "system breaks", neither has anyone who used a distro supplied driver package. And if you installed from the official SH file, well, you did it at your own risk and you had to understand what you were doing. In short, you're lying.
> kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.
Again, didn't affect those who used a distro supplied package. Those who used the installer patched the kernel, which I've done countless times but over the past four years I've done it zero times. In short you're lying again.
> How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
Never ever happened to me or anyone who I know. Show me actual fixed bug reports where NVIDIA is blamed for breaking the DM or bust. I think you're now lying again. Xorg support in NVIDIA drivers have been stellar aside from older GPUs and older drivers not supporting newer Xorg releases but then HW companies do not owe you infinite support. People who expect their more than 15 year old GPUs to work with modern OS'es and support all the features are lunatics.
> How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
What?? Did you come up with this BS in your dream? I've been using NVIDIA since late 90s. Never ever in my entire life I've got the Xorg config file lost. In fact, and here's you lying again (!) Xorg reads this file and closes it right away. It doesn't keep it open. Under no conditions this file could have been lost now or ever. And Xorg has used auto configuration for almost a decade now if I'm not mistaken, so there's no xorg.conf file to speak of. I have a small file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d to enable CoolBits in the NVIDIA driver, that's it.
> How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
You are making stuff up. Again, there will be no bug reports, citations, anything.
> If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
I've been using NVIDIA since Riva TNT2, thank you very much. And the list is a lot longer than you could imagine including MX440, FX 5600 (it was horrible), GeForce 6100 (integrated GPU), 7600 GT, 8800 GT, GTX 660, GTX 1060 and now GTX 1660 Ti.
I don't remember your nickname on nvnews.net (do you even know about this website? nah, I don't think so) - NVIDIA's Linux support forums in the late 90s/early 00s which tells to me everything.
Almost everything you wrote (sans occasional kernel incompatibilities which did _not_ affected normal people) is just pure made up crap.
I can show you nvnews.net and forums.developer.nvidia.com threads with actual issues but you've listed none.
I'm the person who filed this https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/511 and it affects countless people, mainly Turing users.
I know how none other than kernel hackers _intentionally_ broke NVIDIA drivers recently by breaking EFI console, a malicious patch which was later reversed because it affected more than just NVIDIA drivers.
And I also frequent kernel bugzilla and AMD/Intel bug trackers. They have far more serious bug reports.
AMD drivers for certain GPUs have been broken for a large number of people in the past three "stable" releases, including 6.3.9, 10 and 11: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-9b7e0890...
AMD open source drivers have become semi-decent maybe in the past two years at most. Oh, except, RocM. Intel fares better but they are not strangers to deal breaker regressions.
No one is perfect, and trying to say that NVIDIA is hostile to Linux while offering a high quality driver is either malevolent or just mean but it's definitely not true at all.
I know this crap dearly, sorry.
Must be an opinion of someone who has never had to deal with AMD customer support.
That doesn't sound like a topic about a popularity contest. So why did you say "No"? Your statement doesn't disagree with mine.
It’s really not just the Linus thing either. Every time AMD does anything anti-consumer people feel the need to temper it with praise about all the good they’ve done, and give them every benefit of the doubt about “maybe this isn’t true, maybe they had a good reason, etc” while every single thing nvidia does is viewed through the most negative and malicious possible lens.
It’s pretty clearly some variety of splitting plus parasocial attachment, AMD is “the good one” and nvidia is the bad one.
Anyway, it just sucks because it poisons discourse. How many posts did we get into this thread before the “Linus said fuck nvidia” canard came out? Zero, they opened right up with the thought-terminating cliche. It gets old after the 10,000th time.
(I also love how you're being downvoted for wishing for a better debate without fanboy rants.)
And the worst part of gaming on AMD is dealing with AMD's drivers, no matter the platform.
If you remove the steam decks, AMD market share goes down to 50%, similar to their Windows counterparts.
Intel might
Using less power (thus less W to dissipate that will end up heating your room) for the same computing power? Who wouldn't want that?
Unless you're running an overclocked i9 or something, claims of Intel's heat generation are greatly exaggerated in practice.
I boosted the power target to about 125 watts and it runs like a charm. The GPU also just friggin worked. Not "just worked" as in "forget about your Nvidia driver, compile a kernel and end up with a text only boot". I haven't done anything, and suddenly I can do av1 encoding or run 3 screens in 4k60 without a hitch.
Right now I run 100% Linux with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3070.
Everything works perfectly. My only gripe would be nVidia's driver isn't on parity with the Windows one, things like video upscaling haven't made it through yet.
That said I haven't come across games I can't run. Steam / Proton just work, very rarely do I need to go in and tweak something.
Highly recommend Heroic Launcher as well. Very polished Epic/GOG client, get the FlatPak version as that has max compatabilty.
Couldn't be happier with the driver support, getting fairly regular Vulkan and Mesa updates along with Wine.
I play mainly older games, either native or with good Wine support, and performance is really good.
My heavily modded Skyrim (2 and 4k textures) is much, much, smoother now ;-)
Since I'm not running CUDA stuff honestly it was the way to go, even if just for the peace of mind on driver support.
I tend to still buy intel for new desktop builds - I'm not really bottle necked on the cpu for most of my computing needs, so I prefer the built in gpu for ease of maintenance and the better power efficiency (particularly idling, where intel still tends to do better).
But my Deck means I'm showing up as AMD for most of my steam usage over the last few months.
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To avoid just being anecdata - I went and looked up some numbers (on google, they might still be wrong). As best I can tell, Steam claims about 1.9 million monthly active users on linux (may - 2023). Steam also claims that sales of the deck surpassed 3 million total units in 2023.
So 50% of steam decks can end up buried in drawers somewhere and the steam deck would still be 70% of the active linux userbase.
The only reason I care about the number of Linux users is because more users means more development resources. Using that criteria, Steam Deck users very much “count”.
That's technically true, but oversimplified enough to be misleading. SteamOS boots from a read-only OS partition from which you can change nothing. You can only write to your "home folder", and you can only add new software using Flatpak, or Steam itself.
Have state of the art, AMD linux dev kernel, mesa RADV etc, GPU firmware.
But still on x11 native due to the steam client.
Basically, it is a video game console hardware (since they are all AMD too) I can hack into.
Wine itself is approaching Wayland support, so there won't be need for XWayland with it sometime this year hopefully.
BTW, with a lean wine 8.11 build (only win64 core), and vkd3d, can I run cyberpunk 2077? Or horizon zero down?
Was that tested on cyberpunk 2077 and forbidden zero dawn?
vkd3d-proton on the other hand is using whatever available Vulkan features for best performance, so use that. I see no point in vkd3d at all on Linux.
I guess you never tried. No worries. I am a #noproton guy.
The wine 8.11 guys, more specifically the vkd3d guys should provide a compatibility level list which should include titles like cyberpunk 2077 (which has a vulkan backend in theory) and horizon zero dawn (if it has a dx12 backend).
Because if you can compile a lean software layer with small C compilers on elf/linux and you get _really_ working such major titles, that's going to change a lot of things (usually, they manage to put something like an ineffective anti-cheat or custom drm to lock the binaries on windows and please msft).
Using vkd3d for gaming is counter productive, so I see no point in trying it. The result will range from takes a very long time to reach playable state but with bad performance, to not working.
But you can try searching Wine AppDB.
Nothing about the latest wine 8.11 and latest version of cyberpunk 2077 on steam. Horizon Zero Dawn seems to have a dx12 or a vulkan backend, and the EPIC(gog) is gold on wine 8.0 (since it does not have dx<=11).
I know that on complex software, "working" on a previous version does not mean working on the last, but it stays a good signal (same issue with proton).
It wouldn't be a platinum rating, but gold and silver rating allow library overrides.
Don't forget that one of the killer features of vanilla wine: its SDK it only 2 small C compilers, an ELF one, and a COFF one. Namely, tinycc (ELF/COFF) should be sufficient.
And yet it takes a lazy, uncompetitive position against Nvidia, happily delivering overpriced and garbage new GPUs such as the 7600 RX with only 8GB RAM and a 128 bit memory bus.
Nvidia pretty much refuses to drop prices beyond a token tiny amount on any of its current generation GPUs, many of which are underwhelming and extremely overpriced and unappealing to consumers.
This gives AMD a chance to rip Nvidia to shreds in the GPU market but AMD chooses not to.
Very strange.
The AMD RX 7600 competes with NVidia RTX 4060. The suggested MSRP of the RX 7600 is $270, the suggested MSRP of the RTX 4060 is $300. Both have 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit memory bus.
I don't necessarily disagree that AMD's current GPU lineup is overpriced, but so is NVidia's. It's probably because NVidia's current GPU lineup is so vastly, hilarious overpriced that AMD is getting away with it right now.
The OSS 3D acceleration for Radeon cards is functional, implements Vulkan and OpenGL competently, and is fast. It’s built primarily by AMD & Valve engineers (and contractors).
Saying they do not have working acceleration is completely untrue.
AMDs crippling of new game releases by paying to have DLSSv3 support omitted (most recently Jedi Survivor, and looking like Starfield) has completely soured me on the company. I don't feel inclined to support that behaviour financially with my next rig.
I have a 3900x and I'll probably just hold onto it forever. New CPUs are faster but are 25%+ more expensive core for core on top of motherboards being 2-3x more expensive than their pre-COVID pricing for less features (specifically I need a second CPU linked pcie slot for a network card, and no affordable AM5 motherboards seem to do 8x/8x lane splits like you could get with trivially affordable AM4 boards).
> AMDs crippling of new game releases by paying to have DLSSv3 support omitted (most recently Jedi Survivor, and looking like Starfield) has completely soured me on the company. I don't feel inclined to support that behaviour financially with my next rig.
This isn't a new trend sadly. It's insanely annoying to boot a game and see only AMD's subpar stuff baked in whereas when you boot a vendor agnostic or nvidia sponsored game you usually get nvidia's stuff alongside amd's. They did it with the RE4 remake recently too, very annoying to be stuck with FSR when the game advertised DLSS 3 support and had it in the pre-release demo.
Are they good/bad/meh?
At least for my RX6800, it's been smooth sailing in all kinds of gaming.
The only issue, which has started to disappear thanks to the Steam Deck, was certain Anti-Cheat software, which prevented competitive multiplayer in certain titles.
If you have a 10-15 GPU, which are supported by the older, but still open source, radeon drivers they're meh. They're stable but the performance is very poor. (they also lack vulkan support and I think you're limited to opengl 3.x but that's as much because of the hardware as the lack of driver support) (when I say the "performance is poor" I don't just mean that it's 10+ year old hardware and Moore's law has passed it by. I mean the drivers were poorly optimized, and the chipset itself spent a lot of time idle/doing redundant work, even when the graphics card was the bottleneck. The same card playing the same game in Windows would get higher framerates because the Windows drivers were better optimized.)
If you have a 15+year old GPU supported by the fglrx drivers they are (were) bad. Extremely flakey, crashed all the time. AFAIK AMD has long since abandoned them, and if you have a driver that requires the fglrx drivers, you're probably out of luck. For all intents and purposes these cards are expensive, power hungry VESA cards.
With Wine-staging and Mesa / Vulkan stable PPA's, everything has been solid with good performance.
No sweating during kernel updates ;-)
But if you want to run some bleeding edge distribution and play games on Linux then AMD open source driver will work great for you.
in tree, no nvidia bullshit
just works
Edit: This is about the Steam store which is biased since most Linux gamers get games off of the Play store.
Just because Android has a stronger brand than Linux and doesn't feel the need to advertise to people that it uses the Linux kernel, that that doesn't make Android any less of a Linux distribution. Most consumers don't care about the kernel the operating system they have uses. Saying that nobody calls Android "Linux" is irrelevant.
Technically Desktop/Laptop + Handheld since close to half of Steam users on Linux run it on the Deck