I'm surprised it's not 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
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.