Running Nvidia in Linux isn't as much fun. Fedora and Debian can be incredibly reliable systems, but when you add an Nvidia card, I feel like I am back in Windows Vista with kernel crashes from time to time.
Turns out it was a conflict between nvidia drivers and my (10 year old) Intel integrated GPU. But once I switched to an AMD card, everything works flawlessly.
Ubuntu based systems barely worked at all. Incredibly unstable and would occasionally corrupt the output and barf colors and fragments of the desktop all over my screens.
AMD on arch has been an absolute delight. It just. Works. It's more stable than nvidia on windows.
For a lot of reasons-- but mainly Linux drivers-- I've totally sworn off nvidia cards. AMD just works better for me.
Even my 4GB RX 570 from years ago gives a better experience doing this. You just install OBS from flathub, Wayland works, everything works without any setup or tinkering. You click record and you can record your gameplay footage.
It works flawlessly.
Never used Wine + OBS, though.
just ALL videos on my system are broken, I can't play back video past like half speed so the sound gets really choppy
Thanks, Nvidia
Anyway, no judgement, just my POV.
But the other problem that really bugs me is the "AMD reset bug" that you trip over with most AMD GPUs. This is when you pass through a second GPU through to another OS running under KVM, and is what lets you run Linux and (say) Windows simultaneously with full GPU hardware acceleration on the guest. The reset bug means the GPU will hang upon shutdown of the guest and only a reboot will let you recover the card. This is a silicon level bug that has existed for many years across many generations of cards and AMD can't be arsed to fix it. Projects like "vendor-reset" help for some cards, but gnif2 has basically given up (he mentioned he even personally raised the issue with Lisa Su). Even AMDs latest cards like the 7800 XT are affected. NVidia works flawlessly here.
After every kernel upgrade, I just have to reinstall the nvidia drivers and the cuda toolkit.
Everything works as before after I do that. I don't face any problems at all.
What AMD really needs is to have 100% feature parity with CUDA without changing a single line of code. Maybe for this to happen it needs to add hardware features or something (I see people saying that CUDA as an API is very tailored to the capabilities of nvidia GPUs), I don't know.
If AMD relies on people changing their code to make it portable, it already lost.
It would be a painful reverse engineering process - the cuda file format is sort of like elf, but with undocumented bonus constraints, and you'd have to reverse the instruction encoding to get sass, which isn't documented, or try to take it directly to ptx which is somewhat documented, and then convert that onward.
It would be far more difficult than compiling cuda source directly. I'm not sure anyone would pay for a cuda->amdgpu conversion tool, and it's hard to imagine AMD making one as part of ROCm.
I'm wondering how true that is, because that could give NVidia issues in the future if they need to redesign their GPU should they hit some limit with the current designs. Dependence on certain instruction makes sense, but there's not technical preventing AMD from implementing those instructions, only legal mumbo jumbo.
I think where that idea goes wrong is in order to compile it unmodified for nvptx, you need to use a toolchain which knows hip and nvptx, which the cuda toolchain does not. Clang can mostly compile cuda successfully but it's far less polished than the cuda toolchain. ROCm probably has the nvptx backend disabled, and even if it's built in, best case it'll work as well as clang upstream does.
What I'm told does work is keeping all the source as cuda and using hipify as part of a build process when using amdgpu - something like `cat foo.cu | hipify | clang -x hip -` - though I can't personally vouch for that working.
The original idea was people would write in opencl instead of cuda but that really didn't work out.
I've literally been running nvidia on linux since the TNT2 days and have _never_ had this sort of issue. That's across many drivers and many cards over the many many years.
My guess: something like laptop GPU switching failed badly in the nvidia binary, earning it a reputation.
There is some strange issue with some games where they don't get full performance from the dGPU, but more than the iGPU. I have to use optirun to get full performance.
It also has problems when the computer wakes from sleep. For whatever reason, hardware video decoding doesn't work after entering standby. Makes steam in home streaming crash on the client, but flipping to software decoding usually works fine.
The important part is that battery life is almost as good with bumblebee as it is with the dGPU turned off. No more fucking with Prime or rebooting into BIOS to turn the GPU back on.
Having said that - I (or rarely, other people) have almost always managed to work out those issues and get my systems to work. Not in all cases though.
Your statement makes no sense. It's like a smoker claiming that since he didn't die of lung cancer, smoke is 100% safe.
Nvidia has 80% market share of the discrete GPU desktop market and at least 90% market share of cloud/datacenter.
Nvidia GPUs are used almost exclusively for every cloud powered AI service and to train virtually every ML model in existence. Almost always on Linux.
Do you really think any of this would be possible if what you are describing was anything approaching the typical experience starting at the /driver/ level?
Nvidia would have never achieved their market dominance nor held on to it this long if the issues you’ve experienced impacted anything approaching a statistically significant number of users or applications.
Nvidia gets a lot of hate on HN and elsewhere (much of it fair) but I will never understand the people who claim it doesn’t work and get the job done (often very well).
Gaming users may tolerate some flakiness for their hobby but these AI companies dealing in the nine-figure range (minimum) absolutely do not.
But I can promise you after reading things like the LKML for decades and a number of different Microsoft blogs, that everyone on this planet experiences flakiness issues at times and has to figure out how to adjust their workload to avoid it until the issue is discovered and fixed.
Actually, no. Obviously they have Nvidia support but in one especially obscure issue he was describing Meta took it as an internal challenge and put three teams on it in competition. Naturally his team won (of course) ;).
Of course all software has flakiness - I'm not taking the ridiculous position that Nvidia is the first company in history to deliver perfect anything.
What I am saying is these anecdotal reports (primarily from Linux desktop hobbyists/enthusiasts) of "It's broken, it doesn't work. Nvidia sucks because it locked up my patched kernel ABC with Wayland XYZ on my bleeding edge rolling release and blah blah blah" (or whatever) are extreme edge cases and in no way representative of 99% of the Nvidia customer base and use cases.
Show me anything (I don't care what it is) and I'll find someone who has a horror story about it. Nvidia gets a lot of heat from the Linux desktop situation over the years and some people clearly hold an irrational hatred and grudge.
Nvidia isn't perfect but it's very hard to argue they don't deliver generally working solutions - actually best of breed in their space as demonstrated by their overwhelmingly dominant market share I highlighted originally.
1. They supported linux when no one else did, 2. I've never experienced instability from their drivers, and as I mentioned before, I've been running their cards under linux since the TNT2 days.
Which is literally only 1% of users anyway
I'm not here to desparage anyone experiencing issues, but my experience on the NixOS rolling-release channel has also been pretty boring. There was a time when my old 1050 Ti struggled, but the modern upstream drivers feel just as smooth as my Intel system does.
Pop_OS, Fedora and OpenSUSE work out of the box. Those are all Wayland I believe. Debian/Ubuntu distros are a bad time. I think they’re still X11. It’s ironic because X11 is supposed to be the more stable window manager.
I'm definitely not against better hardware support for AI, but I think your problems are more GNOME's fault than Nvidia's. KDE's Wayland session is almost flawless on Nvidia nowadays.
I have come to accept that graphics card drivers and hardware stability ultimately comes down to whether or not ghosts have decided to haunt you.
I have a nvidia laptop with popos. That works well.
Can not confirm. I used nvidia for years when it was the only option. Then used the nouveau driver on a well supported card because it worked well and eliminated hassle. Now I'm on AMD APU and it just works out of the box. YMMV of course. We do get reports of issues with AMD on specific driver versions, but I can't reproduce.