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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

AMD's Mesa drivers are better, but if you already have an Nvidia card then you can still use it just fine with Wayland.

The biggest hit is Vulkan performance (~20% less than Windows iirc) but for desktop and casual gaming use, Nvidia's proprietary drivers are perfectly fine.

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I specifically bought an AMD card for my living room Steam box, and I've had way more driver issues with that computer than when it had an nVidia card (although there's also other software changes). Mostly: the audio hitches frequently when outputting via HDMI, and a many-year-old AMD driver bug where it will always prefer YUV to RGB when supported by the display with no kernel parameters or anything to override (this one is apparently finally getting fixed in 7.2 hopefully). That said, I've had some issues with the nVidia drivers too, and I much prefer open source ones, ceteris paribus.

Seconding this. I'm not happy with the fact that the drivers are proprietary, I really prefer FOSS. But, I am tired of having to deal with FUD around performance and issues with NVIDIA devices which simply don't exist at scale.

I have friends who are stuck on Windows not because they play games with Windows-only anticheat, but because theyve been told by GNU heads that NVIDIA drivers simply don't perform acceptably on Linux.

Firefox is software rendered on linux-nvidia which leads to a bizarre situation of simple web animations lagging on decent computers.

I'd say it's deserved, not FUD. Nvidia did improve in some ways, but it's still way too heavy into blob even in case you plan to use it in the future with nvk. Nouveau / nova developers explained that Nvidia pushed a lot more into their firmware than AMD, turning the kernel driver into more of a shim than an actual driver. That's already a big downside.

It's a tradeoff, and if you're not doing any fancy-pants CUDA work then it's a pretty big one. But most people are already using these blob-heavy drivers on Windows, so switching that same system to Linux is not a huge downgrade in terms of usability or stability. It isn't recommended for new Linux PCs, but it's not a dealbreaker for people switching OSes (anymore).

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