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Comment by thorw93040494 | Hacker News Reader

As always, wait year or two so drivers catch up.

A decade or two with Nvidia.

Nvidia has long been ahead of AMD. They seem to be close to parity right now thanks to Valve’s efforts, but that has historically not been the case. AMD was the one that needed a decade to catch up until Valve started helping.

I wonder if the Radeon driver has gotten reliable GPU restart support. The GPU becoming unrecoverable if a shader crashed was long a major issue on Radeon on Linux, and I am not sure if valve fixed it for AMD.

On Windows Nvidia has better drivers. On Linux, AMD is far ahead.

Implying Windows Nvidia > Linux Nvidia?

It is mostly the same driver on both platforms. In any case, I use Nvidia’s 565.77 driver on Linux with KDE Plasma 6.2 and Wayland. It works well for me on my RTX 3090 Ti.

Most of the Linux Nvidia driver bugs seem to be related to the DRM/KMS layer, not the shared code. That's still a pretty big surface area.

Was never my experience over decades. Nvidia’s proprietary drivers were a pain the ass to install but they were great to use.

Ditto. I was around to remember the fglrx days on the AMD side. Ugggggggly. And that situation persisted for over a decade.

> On Linux, AMD is far ahead.

Depends on a metric. I found Nvidia drivers to be better on every platform. It's just because it's closed-source it's PITA to install and update, but everything in between is great.

I've switched to AMD for religious reasons, tho. Even update story is worse on Windows for AMD, at least it was when I had RX 6900 XT.

When I was using my 1080Ti on Debian with the official driver, I would frequently have problems on screen 2 where there seemed to be no video acceleration. I could fix this temporarily through some setting in the Nvidia drivers but it would stop working after a reboot.

I had several bad updates (this was when using Fedora) and was left with graphics 30 minutes before I had to start work, I ended up plugging in a really old AMD GPU to be able to work for the day and then spent several hours faffing to get graphics back up.

I will only buy AMD/Intel cards now because it is plug and play on Linux. I've had no problems with the AMD card on Debian 12. On Debian 11 I had to enable a non-free repo to install the relevant firmware. The 1080Ti as awesome at the time as it was, only worked properly and reliably under Windows.

The other issue with Nvidia is when they stop supporting your card, their drivers will sooner or later not work with the kernel. I have an older machine that works quite well and I had to buy another GPU as the legacy Nvidia drivers do not work with new kernels. The hardware itself works fine.

Since it was a debian, i have to ask - was a driver 10 years old already when you used it? I also had 1080 Ti (and a regular 1080), worked flawlessly in: Windows 10, FreeBSD, NixOS. I don't recall versions I ran tho.

As I said there was issue where one screen wouldn’t be accelerated. This was on both Debian and Fedora this was around 2020. I started using Debian around 10 I think.

Did you report the issue?

Your info looks a decade old. AMD driver on Linux are better that NVIDIA. They simply just work out of the box.

I find Nvidia has a great out of box experience too, or as close to out of box that it can be when you run Gentoo like I do. Gentoo needs to have the drivers added to it. This applies to both AMD and Nvidia equally, since a basic Gentoo install has no graphics support.

Anyway, Valve has improved the AMD community driver on Linux, but I have yet to hear any news on RADV being able to recover from GPU hangs. Nvidia’s driver can. The last I looked a few years ago, the security guys were begging the AMD driver developers to look at static analyzer reports. Meanwhile, the open source driver that Nvidia released shows that Nvidia uses static analyzers given that it has preprocessor directives from Coverity. I really would not regard AMD as being at Nvidia’s level yet on Linux, even if it is coming close.

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