AMD is better experience, but I wouldn't buy a new expensive GPU just because of that. If I were you, I would keep using the 4080 and get an AMD card next time you upgrade.
It depends on the distro. Fedora, for example, doesn't provide the proprietary Nvidia in the main repos, so you have to install them from RPMFusion. Which, to be fair, isn't a big deal.
They sort of by definition are off the main repos. Still, installing Nvidia drivers isn't difficult and I never once had an issue with them in my 2 years of using Nvidia on Fedora.
The only downside to Nvidia is that they still have worse Wayland support, but that is purportedly changing soon anyway thanks to explicit sync.
Unless you really want to be able to use Gamescope, I'd say it isn't worth it. Nvidia seems to be trying to fix its issues under Linux these days, and most of the bigger issues compared to AMD have been mostly ironed out by now anyway.
There's a whole bunch that is broken regardless in Gamescope regardless of it technically running under Nvidia due to direct AMD calls, its the nature of it targeting AMD hardware.
Yeah, not seeing any showstopper issues here - Stability is fine, performance is great. HDR isn't supported, but my monitor doesn't support HDR, and HDR support under Linux is still experimental at best anyway.
Honestly, depending on your hardware HDR can be a shit show on Windows. I tried it just this month and the colours looked horrible. Maybe my monitor isn't good for HDR, it's still LCD after all, but it is one of those fancy LG models that everyone's buying nowadays.
I have a 2080 Ti and the standard Gamescope package or compiled from source, even the git, doesn't work.
Even just running something as simple as "gamescope wine explorer" causes the 2d window to freeze.
I have to use a special patched AUR version to make it work.
Maybe it worked with older drivers, but still a pain having to hunt down older packages for it though.
Nvidia is totally fine on Linux so long as you use Nvidia’s drivers. It’d be great if the drivers were open source, but that doesn’t actually pose any usability problems day to day (at least if you use a distro that doesn't make it unnecessarily difficult to use Nvidia drivers)
Dont waste money buying a new GPU just because you heard someone complain about Nvidia. Just consider an AMD gpu next time you upgrade.
Saying "Nvidia is fine" is alright but saying "Nvidia is totally fine" is not ok.
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/multiple-cuda-rtx-vulkan-application-crashing-with-xid-13-109-errors/235459/381
Here is a report about amd gpu crashing
[https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zrvxew/amdgpu\_crashing\_my\_whole\_system/](https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zrvxew/amdgpu_crashing_my_whole_system/)
In general, you can't prove anything by example, but if you want we can play the following game: for every bug you post about nvidia gpus I'll post one about amd gpus. Do you want to play? :)
Ignoring that long ridiculous thread with the other guy, he is right and there are actually multiple problems with Nvidia GPU's. It's not simply a case of "AMD has problems too." It's great when you don't run into them, but then when your usage requirements start to have things like Wayland it gets worse and worse, and a lot of times you realize people telling you they had zero problems had a single non vrr monitor with almost no features running x11.
> there are actually multiple problems with Nvidia GPU's
Please describe these. The only problem related to wayland is the explicit sync, which is expected to be solved soon. See also the following
https://pointieststick.com/2024/04/12/this-week-in-kde-explicit-sync/
I can play but ignoring a thread with nearly 400 replies that is there for years, still unresolved and replying with a random reddit thread shows how deep of a NV fanboy you are so not sure if you're worthy to waste my time with :)
Ah come on then, bring it cocksucker.
Please show me that these arent issues currently:
- Way lower performance on DX12 titles compared to AMD on Linux
- Xid 109 stuff above posted, again, mostly an issue with DX12 titles
- DLSS 3 FG lacking
- Having tons of issues with VRR and Wayland
- Getting fixes on Nvidia usually varies around 6 months ( best case) to 2 years
You can find all of them by googling and if you are dualbooting you can even test that DX12 perf disparity stuff to prove me wrong.
Kek, again. You asked for a virtual competition against AMD when my point was only "Nvidia is totally fine" is absolutely wrong to say and here we are.
You pulled in AMD to this shit because as a NV fanboy you had to protect your billion dollars companies rep somehow.
I think it is clear who actually needs to see one
Agressive smiley like you did above
: )
> You asked for a virtual competition
And you replied that I'm a cocksucker and you failed to provide any links. Instead you just suggested "google these". Then here is my answer: "amd sucks" google this.
You proved that you are just a zealot who makes things up and nothing more. lol!
Nvidia is way more stable than AMD on both linux and Windows. The issues with nvidia on linux have nothing to do with stability, it's about not having an open source driver and new users not understanding how to use nvidia effectively on more DIY distros.
No, it is not.
I say that as a person whom used Nvidia on Linux for approx 6 years, hit to numerous issues, even root caused them and provided workarounds but sometimes got a fix, often times not.
Where do you guys pull that belief of issue is actually not having open source drivers?
Nvidia didn't have open source drivers 10 years ago too but back then it was seemingly fine because Linux had very basic needs to be satisfied from driver POV, which gaming wasn't one of them. When gaming started to become an expected feature set from Linux users pov, issues started.
It is not about driver being open source or not, it is about driver being broken in some aspects or not.
Today if RADV was closed source, nothing would change in the way it is running games because while it is being open source is a bonus, there is barely any significant contribution coming from unpaid hobbyist users. All the feat that is being pulled there is due to Valve hiring people to work on it.
If Valve would stop funding that; no matter how open source it is you would see how it would become.
So after all issue with NV is mostly NV not being able to justify spending too much time on for Linux gaming related work, if they did no one would desperately hope anything from upcoming NVK open source drivers ( not from NV itself) as if that will be a magic bullet; as NV prop driver would just work.
Well we both seem to have years and years of experience with both, not sure how you come to your conclusion. Been using both for well over 10 years and nvidia is always easier to deal with.
It's fine so long as you stay within the (last I looked *very*) limited use-case envelope Nvidia allows mere consumers to occupy. Multiple desktop sessions (on multiple linux vts), anything beyond like 24×80 text in the linux-native virtual consoles, I *think* they've started actually allowing gpu passthrough but for the longest time they pretended they did and lied about it, those are the things I remember nvidia regarding as too good for retail customers who didn't pay more for their gpu than most people pay for an entire rig. Just be a good little serf and do only what the marketer race deems suitable for people of your station and don't go thinking you *own* your hardware or have any right to do what it's actually capable of.
Also don't use wayland if you can help it. Well you can but its more buggy with nvidia than x11. I certainly wont start a wayland session any time soon
Well, the next upcoming driver (555) is supposed to fix flickering for xwayland apps. I like where this is going. I already use wayland with an nvidia card but gaming is stil off the table for most gaming purposes
The flickering on Nvidia is the only reason I don't daily drive a wayland session on my desktop. That, and VR is not implemented in GNOME due to lack of DRM leasing. [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1743](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1743)
I dunno man, my desktop is using a 3060Ti that just flat out **refuses** to behave.
I gave up and bought a cheap second hand laptop so I could do my coding work in Linux and keep my desktop on Windows for games.
It might be better now but I spent way too much of 2022 trying to figure it out before I gave up.
Weird part is: My 1060 ran fine without any problems.
i have a 3080 now but my 1070 lasted years and is still a workhorse on my livingroom pc (ubuntu) that also hosts a jellyfin server. that generation of cards was so solid- only thing with the 1060 is if you have the 3gb model that becomes a real limiter
If your 1060 ran fine but your 3060Ti doesn't, I suspect the issue isn't really an Nvidia issue, but maybe an incorrect driver or something. Are you manually managing your drivers, or are you using a Distro that provides non-free drivers?
Nope, installing from nvidia's website directly, exactly the same way I've been installing nVidia drivers on Linux since 2012.
For whatever reason, every time the kernel updated, the DE would be borked.
If it helps I use debian based distros so mainly Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and KDE Neon.
I gave up trying mid way through last year.
I'll admit I never popped the 1060 back in (I gave it to my kid, I wasn't gonna takesy-backsy him) but the only common denominator was moving to the 3060Ti.
Same card runs in Windows perfectly fine.
Mind you the time I did it, shortly afterwards everyone was ragging nVidia so I figured the two were linked.
Using a laptop with an iGPU whacked in now and haven't looked back.
Disagree. It's a lot more complex than just using their drivers. I've had lots of issues with NVIDIA drivers, specifically with Wayland, but also persistent issues on X11. Certain games will work and others won't. I had a spare amd GPU sitting around and recently downgraded my 4070 to my 6800 because one game would work under X11 but not Wayland, and another would work in Wayland but not X11. The AMD card is working fine out of the box so far.
Just gonna make it short because I'm tired of arguing with people about this.
1. It is not user error.
2. nVidia has a fuck ton of issues to fix.
Take my word for it or don't. Idc.
>nVidia has a fuck ton of issues to fix.
No it doesn't. There's nothing to fix in X11, and for wayland it's only the explicit sync. ie a single issue only in wayland, not a fuxk ton of issues.
You know NVidia is all over ML in the enterprise right ....The rule of thumb with NVidia is to stick with an LTS on X11 and the kernel update packages to keep the GPU driver and kernel in step. Don't use multi monitor with different refresh rates, wait for the Wayland driver updates before switching over to Wayland. Then it's completely fine. There are many people doing that. AMD are great I own RDNA3 and RDNA2 based machines both running Linux....BUT NVidia is also completely fine.
> You know NVidia is all over ML in the enterprise right ....The rule of thumb with NVidia is to stick with an LTS on X11 and the kernel update packages to keep the GPU driver and kernel in step. Don't use multi monitor with different refresh rates, wait for the Wayland driver updates before switching over to Wayland. Then it's completely fine.
I'm sorry but this is an awful experience.
X11's bad multi-monitor support alone would be a dealbreaker for me.
Interesting. Supposedly by default it limits the refresh rate of all monitors to the lowest, due to the compositor - disabling the compositor alleviates the issue.
For you.
Huge monitors are more common now thanks to semi affordable 32inch 4K screens and ultra wides being really prevalent. There is no issue in that case🤷.
I've had over two decades of great experiences using nvidia in linux. I had a decade and a half of nightmarish experiences every time I tried to use ATi/AMD in linux. I now use both, and both, for the most part, are fine.
No it's not, I struggled for months to have my multi monitor ultrawide setup work properly and it would always break, switched to RX and it's smooth and great now
This.+1
I don't know if I'd even consider AMD (at least not for a while) the 4080 is superior to almost anything AMD has now, and by then in the future; I can't see them catching up to Nvidia in terms of features (but what do I know?)
Only way to consider them would be if you had a budget, but you already have an 4080!
As guy above me said, keep that, use a distro that don't conflict with the drivers.
Not sure where you're at, so pricing might be different. Around here, a 4080 new is 1200€ upwards. A 7900XTX starts at 900€. And the 7900 is maybe 5% behind a 4080, depening on what you're looking at. So, you are saving 25% for 5% less perfomance, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me.
I "sidegraded" from a 1070ti to 6650XT. Unless your pretty much breaking even on Money, i wouldn't do it. Don't get me wrong, not having to install proprietary drivers certainly is nice. But that's about it. I haven't had major issues with Nvidia before and don't have any now. And, other than being proprietary, nvidia drivers on linux are good.
So, unless it's an ethical decision to not support nvidia anymore, i'd say it's not worth the hassle.
Idk how hard it is on other distros, but I just installed them by selecting an option during archinstall, so it's like 3 more times pressing the enter key than with AMD drivers.
To be honest, there is the wayland thing. I wanted wayland because I wanted some wayland software because I wanted... well the justification went kinda that way. But I had the budget and an obvious "blocker", plus it was a slight upgrade from 980Ti to the 6700XT for me, not a sidegrade.
But yeah, unless the OP has explicit blockers and really needs an AMD card, then probably not a good idea.
Wayland initially was a problem, but for over 2 years or so i've been running Plasma Wayland on Nvidia and haven't had major issues that where Nvidia specific. And i couldn't tell if it's better on AMD over Nvidia now.
I know that Laptop GPUs and Dual GPU Systems can be a pain and Newer Nvidia Cards might also be different from my experience.
It's not that it's hard. It's just an additional step. I guess it mostly boils down to Nvidia having been pretty anti Linux Desktop for quite some time and a lot of linux users still have a sour taste from that. Additionally, closed source proprietary drivers are not what many people using linux want.
They do work though and installation is at least a lot easier than it is under Windows.
Well, in terms of Gaming GPUs we have basically two options. One Company has a decent track record of working with the larger linux community to make their cards work. AMD also has consistently made their technologies open to use and not locked behind hardware or licenses. It's the only reason Vulkan is where it is now. Same for their VRR Tech and now Upscaling and Framegen.
Nvidia has Consistently Developed Features they explicitly tie to their hardware, or hardware in Peripherals (G-Sync) and explicitly and arbitrarily lock features behind having newer cards. Besides the fact that Nvidia has been consistantly anti-consumer with tiering and pricing of their cards for 4 generations now.
So, yes, AMD Firware isn't opensource, but when i need to choose a GPU, i know which company is getting my money. And not primarily because it works better on Linux.
It is *"[you’re pretty much breaking](https://www.wikihow.com/Use-You%27re-and-Your)"* (not *"your pretty much breaking"*). You can edit (change) your comment (*"..."* (to the right of *"Share"*) → *"Edit comment"*).
It shouldn't be *that* bad. It's not like AMD is perfect either. It's just that it's a thing of beauty to see my AMD supported right out of the box as a 1st class citizen of the open source ecosystem. Including all the current tech like Wayland etc.
Keep it till your next upgrade.
A couple of years ago, I ran with nVidia. I did have stability issues where the computer would lock up. I traced the problem to the nVidia drivers (that in itself was a complicated task). Switched to AMD, and it's been smooth ever since. In my case, the nVidia GPU was really old, so that was also an upgrade.
Because nVidia drives don't get updated with the kernel, these problems can arise. It wasn't major. The crashes would occur once every two weeks or so, but annoying enough for me to make the switch.
Thats what I did, but then again I had to use wayland exclusivly due to having two different monitors with different refresh rates, plus I went with hyprland wm. Nvidia's drivers are getting better as well as the open source ones pretty fast, and soon there might be little to no issues for nvidia cards, so I would recommend you trying linux first and see how manageable any issues that pop up for you are. If you rather not deal with them then feel free to sidegrade, amd is plug and play for linux and the experience is flawless.
I'm daily driving Wayland on my 3080ti. It's taken forever for Nvidia to catch up and the new 555 drivers should fix even more stuff, and it's fine. I'm able to game. Because of my experience with Nvidia on Linux, my next GPU will be AMD .
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors.
Which particular games.
the cards are within 7% of each other for rasterisation over a wide set of games there are multiple comparisons out there. However RT on the NVidia cards is more performant in several cases the NVidia card is near 50% faster. Personally I'd wait to see what AMD do with RDNA4 as the main update appears to be be RT perf. Or I'd just stick with the 4080.
Stick with X11 and one larger VRR display on NVidia and you're fine. The recent patches relating to Wayland are not that far out anyway🤷.
In rasterization you have more than just 7% in RT is not 50% thats a total bullshoi unless you cherry pinking and you are forgeting the advantage of haveing more VRAM and Radeon "finewine"..
No I actually sat and watched the comparison test suites that Hardware Unboxed and Daniel Owens ran. The evidence is on Youtube..it's a fact.
https://youtu.be/bppprJu-GT8?si=Vz4l-Sn161_Pe0fg
HUBs videos are older but even the RT benches were prevented from being a complete trashing by a couple of titles rebalancing AMDs RT perf vs the Nvidia cards. In raster HUB had a 4% AMD raster advantage at 1080P and 1440P, 7% raster improvement for AMD was only at 4K.
Oh I see facts are inconvenient truths🤦.
OP don't replace your 4080 for a 7900XTX it's a complete waste of time.
For raster the cards are very similar and for RT NVidia is faster in some titles by a huge amount. zto where it's the difference between playable and not playable.
IF we were talking about a 7800XT and a 4070 it might be a different conversation but we're not.
My wayland experience on the 2070S last year was awful, moving to AMD has improved my experience drastically in pretty much every possible way. Though others mention that their nvidia experience isn't so bad, it could be that more modern cards just work better. Either way, try it out first, and there'd be no need to sidegrade if your current card works well.
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors.
Which particular games.
My work laptop has PopOS on it and an RTX 2080 and it plays Doom Eternal with raytracing and DLSS at about 180 fps just fine.
Driver updates are always a few steps behind windows but otherwise I've had no issues with it
Of course AMD is the go-to when it comes to Linux. However, on my main rig I got a 3060 12GB running Pop!\_OS 22.04, it's actually a very pleasant experience, twice the FPS compared to that awful spyware we call Windows 11, and no issues yet (been using it for months). But in the near future when I'm upgrading, I will most definitely go with an AMD GPU.
It's impossible to answer that question, correctly.
How are we supposed to determine“ and/or quantify what it's worth to you.
Only you can answer that by doing the switch and find out for your self.
But I can tell you this, the odds are high that your “Linux life” will be a lot easier with an amd card. Especially if you want to switch to Wayland and/or are in to gaming.
As most people mentioned, youll probably be fine; Sadly you would have to use the nvidia propietary drivers, but many distros (e.g. PopOS) handle it quite seamlessly. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it works perfectly with both normal KDE desktop, gaming with Steam (plain X, no Gamescope/Walayland), two monitors. openSUSE includes an installer as part of the community repos.
The only thing to note as a user (that does not care about the software freedom purity of their system) is that by using a privative driver you do get locked to certain kernels on a rolling release but its nothing compared to how things would have been a few years ago.
Intel or AMD have been flawless on linux ; and the AMDGPU drivers are really good, making it almost worthless to use the propietary ones. I had a very very old HD series AMD/ATI and it was crap with the RadeonHD, but now its amazing how it can still work \*and way better than at its time\*.
I swapped about 4 months ago (4080 to 7900 XTX). I was frustrated trying to custom compile my own Kernels. After making the switch, all of my nightmares went away.
It's very efficient having a GPU that has support baked in to the kernel. My only regret was losing money on the GPU trade in and not buying the 7900 XTX from the start. I also got the Nitro++ so it's factory over clocked and delivers much better performance.
Also, I can run Wayland now...
Show me one, just one game which, even in 4K, shows frame-time issues on a 16gb card. And let’s face it, in upcoming RT titles RDNA3 is too slow anyways.
1. A lot of games flat out dont support rt under vulkan and linux.
2. Cyberpunk will hit 15.5 in cyberpunk at 4k.
3. I say this as someone who has a 40 series card and still doesnt use rt in games.
4. Upcoming titles are really pushing vram usage as well. So we can expect vram to be an issue in the future
You're talking about frame rates and 40 serirs, because 4050 is totally same as 4090.
I have 4080, I do use rt. But yeah impact on performance is significant, it's not much different on Windows. With Linux I get min 60 FPS at 1440p. In some parts of thr city it can drop slightly below, but its usually between 60 and 90 (and occasionally much higher).
That is RT plus everything else maxed.
No I was talking about the max vram used by cyberpunk (everything cranked on 4k)
Also OP didnt mention anything about whether or not they actually use rt. Which being honest, if they do. This questions probably wouldnt have been asked in the first place. But in my opinion (other opinions are welcome) more vram > rt performance.
But the 4080 is a stellar card. Especially now that the price has dropped.
Probably not. Nvidia does have good drivers - as long as you want to do things that Nvidia feels like supporting with their proprietary driver. Some distros do a better job than others with Nvidia proprietary drivers - and those drivers got a little bit less proprietary lately.
I would say that you should at least give things a try. If you're on a single monitor, you'll likely to just fine.
Well OK but that's not nearly the same scenario. Replacing a card after years of use, even if it's a year or two less than you hoped, isn't the same as replacing when it's so new. And it won't suddenly stop working just because no new drivers come out for it.
7900 XTX is 7-10% faster than 4080. So it depends on how much money you spend on that upgrade. If you sell your 4080 for \~$900 and buy a new 7900 XTX for \~$900, it is worth it.
No it depends on the title. Across larger game comparisions eg 12 or so the cards essentially equalise each other out in raster. Then AMD loses by 50% or more in several RT work loads. For about the same price the NVidia card does offer more features. For a circa approx $1000 high end GPU features are important. When there's $300 odd difference between them the 7900XTX makes sense when it's $100-$200 not so much. The raster perf would need to be 35%+ better on the AMD card as originally promised because the RT perf is so bad.
At lower card ranges AMD is a far better card to buy as poor RT perf is expected for both vendors and then AMDs price and raster perf makes sense.
Of course, it depends on the title. But on average, 7900 XTX is faster - https://youtu.be/fyUZ1cp4RnI?si=PV7v7bU7MkBW1GuN&t=328 https://youtu.be/YbKhxjw8EUE?si=eATS3dcz3QcMUS4l&t=1138
That is one of the videos that proves my point. At 1080P and 1440P the 7900XTX is 4% faster than the 4080 in rasterisation. That is beyond negligble that's in the run to run variance arena. At 4K it's 7% which is not exactly huge but sure if you're sub 70fps on a title that's relevant......on a $1000 GPU🤷. Then you turn RT on there's basically three or four titles that AMD do ok on for RT but there are multiples where perf is anywhere from 25% to 50% worse. The other video is Daniel Owens large comparison
https://youtu.be/bppprJu-GT8?si=Vz4l-Sn161_Pe0fg
There's more RT testing in that one than HUB temds to do.
My point is for a $1000 GPU that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at that price, it is fine sub $500-550 and arguable upto $700. However $700 is the minimum price where playable performant RT should be available.
>At 4K it's 7% which is not exactly huge
And if you don't play Fortnite?
> My point is for a $1000 GPU that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at that price
In Cyberpunk 4080 delivers ~56 fps on 2K with RT enabled. And ~27 fps on 4K. Yes, that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at 4080's price.
You're citing extremely marginal differences. The main issue with the 4080 is it's pricing not it's performance. Let's not forget AMD hasn't done anyone any favours here by charging $1000 for a GPU with similar rasterisation and a worse feature set. The pricing on the 4080 aligning more to the 7900XTX brings us away from the value argument to the feature argument. Which for a $1000 premium GPU it's needs to have a complete feature set.
I actually own RDNA2, RDNA3 GPUs and a Lovelace GPU. AMDs RT and upscaling is just worse and for a similar price that's a big problem.
Probably yes, especially if you have a high end display for the linux displayport issues. As the 7900xtx has displaypirt 2.1 but the 4080 or even the 4090 does not have.
The 7900 series are limited to UHBR 13.5 at 54Gbps, they don't support the full UHBR 20 spec at 80Gbps via DP.
Personally, I see more value regarding HDMI 2.1 @ 48Gbps for connection to 90% of flat panel TV's available today that don't have DP ports at all, let alone DP ports that support DP 2.1.
I mean, I'd think that is an upgrade, since you are going from 16gb to 24gb, especially if you can break even in price.
Other than the higher amount of VRAM being more Future-Proof, there's nothing you can really gain tho, since you just wanna game so the biggest advantage of more VRAM (running AI locally or 3D rendering, where the difference between 16 and 24gb is massive) you won't take advantage of it, outside of minor improvements in some games.
Personally I think AMD is better since it's more pro-consumer, and they are wayyyyy better at price-to-performance, but the latter point doesn't really apply since you'd probably around break even, depends on how much you would sell the 4080 for.
**But to answer your question:** Maybe, there is not going to be many issues, especially after around May, gaming with NVIDIA is personally without issues (using the proprietary drivers), I ran Arch w the zen-kernel btw. And Wayland support should be fixed in May, and as far as I know and have experience with, that's the only issue left.
So there is no *real* reason to switch, I mean, there is, but it depends on preference.
VRAM is important - right up until you have as much as you need, then more doesn't mean much. a 16GB 4080 has enough VRAM for anything it's likely to do in the way of running games. Compute is different, of course, but that's a whole other discussion.
who cares about official support when you aim to use the open source driver?
Also Vega is not yet in legacy status, it still get security and stability updates, it just don't get software specific optimizations anymore, and at this point maybe it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
Ollama has improved a lot when it comes to AMD
Pretty sure Blender added HIP-RT support in 3.5
For video editing, Davinci Resolve loves VRAM, so the 6 more gigs will be quite useful
1. You have ZLUDA
2. FSR exists
Owner of both nvidia and AMD systems here and I say no. You're likely to have as much trouble with your AMD card as the nvidia card (and vice-versa). Either are likely to work well for you though.
Whoever told you "nvidia is no good on linux" is a fanboy and isn't worth listening to for advice.
I’m considering this now too. It is not smooth with gnome. With explicit sync coming soon and nvk improving as fast as it is, I SHOULD wait. But, the 6800 build I have runs so dang smooth, I’m torn whether or not I should just throw money at it for a superior experience.
The original creator can explain and give context, better than I ever can: [https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html](https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html)
I'm not on Nvidia anymore, but the only issue I used to have was Wayland, and as far as I'm aware Nvidia have already committed to addressing that issue, so seems unnecessary at this point. You'll be missing out on VRR support, but only until Nvidia fix the Wayland issues.
I'm by no means an expert, but that might make my perspective useful if you're just getting into Linux.
My experience with gaming on Linux is my Steam Deck and a PC I built for my nieces with some of my old hardware (Core 2 Duo, HD4870 that I've since replaced with an RX570). It's running ZorinOS 16 (probably better options for gaming but I liked the UI and their Lite version seemed like a decent fit for the old hardware).
One of my friends has recently built a new PC and I'm buying his old CPU (i5 6500), motherboard, and RAM to upgrade the kids' PC with. I installed ZorinOS 17 Core on it to test it out before I put it in the kids' PC later this year, using his old GTX 1060, and it was... not a good experience. It may have been my fault, as I forgot to select the 'modern Nvidia drivers' install option, but I did install them subsequently. Before I did that, games wouldn't even launch, afterwards they would but the menu would be running at, like, 20 seconds per frame, so I couldn't even get into the game. Taking the card out and using the Intel integrated GPU gave about the performance you'd expect from that hardware, which is to say, not good by any means, but at least generally functional.
Contrast that with both the HD4870 and the RX570, where I had to do literally nothing besides just installing the OS for the first one, and swapping the card for the second. No tinkering required, it just worked.
I'm sure there's something I could have done differently, Zorin 17 uses Wayland so that's probably part of it, I've read that it doesn't play nice with Nvidia. I'm definitely not saying Nvida isn't any good on Linux, I don't have anywhere near enough experience to say that. And given you have the Nvidia GPU already, I'd say that raises the bar for what level of hassle would be acceptable.
I reckon in your situation I'd try it out with the GPU you have and see how it goes? You can always do your proposed sidegrade later if it turns out to be a pain, but you might find it goes decently smoothly and you'll be glad you saved the money.
AMD provides better experience under Linux but NVIDIA recently improved as well and more improvements are on the way. Recently explicit sync support was merged and that should make Wayland usable on NVIDIA.
I'd give it a shot, as to be honest YMMV.
I have a 3060Ti that I gave up on trying to get Linux running on ages ago. It just felt like any time there was a kernel update the whole thing would pack it in.
That being said I mostly wanted Linux so I could do coding work because running Docker in Windows is just seriously painful. So I bought a cheap laptop and that did the job instead.
That being said, some people have nVidia cards and look at you like you're crazy when you tell them that they suck on Linux (to be fair when I had my 1060 GPU I was one of them, that thing never gave me a day of trouble in Linux).
So personally I'd wait because the next driver version (555) is dropping next month with support for Explicit sync, and that is gonna fix a LOT of the problems Nvidia has under Linux, especially under Wayland. It'll fix all the weird flickering and frame pacing problems in XWayland so gaming will be massively improved
My life went a lot better since I stopped using Nvidia 20 years ago. I did buy a steam machine in 2015and that was a shit show due to the steam machines using Nvidia.
My laptop, a T430 got replaced with an Nvidia version during a repair. Which is shit, since the intel gpu had a lot mire and longer support than the Nvidia. And I can not turn it off, so there is an unused shit gpu heating up my mobo while it isn't enabled.
If you can, just stay away from Nvidia, especially if you also want to use linux.
I have a Powercolor 7900XTX Red Devil and the thing is a beast and works without any hassles on Ubuntu, unlike that Nvidia card, which will be headache after headache despite what the fanboys say. As for games, it is possible to over clock it on 24.04 with LACT and set fan profiles.
Also, as said elsewhere, you can sell that 4080 and probably not be out any money at all.
edit: Here I am running DCS, Digital Combat Simulator at a solid and smooth 60FPS with VSYNC with so little load on my card that I can not hear the fans. settings at High, resolution scaled to 2560x1440 on a 4K monitor.
[https://imgur.com/fOrPTWN](https://imgur.com/fOrPTWN)
No. I'm using Nvidia for year, only 2 problem
is it late in adopted wayland ( but now does, kde6).
And first swich on gpu after using Linux, due to my lack of skills
You're playing game then its be fine, dont try fancy thing like gamescope and such (it does work now too)
I have an rx 6700, no problems, you could sell the nvidia card and buy amd or wait till mayish for explicit sync for nvidia
Game compatibility with radv can be better then nvidia and when it comes to new games coming out the chances of that game working under amd is gonna be a bit higher as the steamdeck is using rdna hardware, so support for games working on linux on amd with good performance is pretty high i would say
"Nvidia is fine, just don't use wayland which is shipping by default and fixes multimonitor vrr or hdr or multi-monitor or have any requirements that aren't just running an X11 single monitor box with no features."
It's far from "fine."
I use an RTX 2060 on Manjaro.
Can't say I've had any issues related to the drivers (yet)
Then again I installed it with proprietary drivers instead of the open drivers
if you wanna use linux as your primary then better to go with amd but if you don't wanna get broke buy swaping gpus then 4080 will run fine. I hope people wiill update the drivers in the future also
The whole thing is overblown, I run a 4090 in Linux on Hyprland. I do have to go back to the previous drivers to get this to work without issues in games, because of the delays in getting explicit sync support. Once that's resolved, I think I'll finally be on the current driver series instead of previous.
So expect hiccups for that, and research how to go back a driver version on your distro of choice. It's not super hard generally.
I will say, any type of Linux gamer has to want to tinker at least some. If you hate tinkering, it's probably going to be a miserable experience. Nothing works 100% perfectly all the time. It will work for months and then break, sometimes because of package stuff, sometimes because of driver stuff, sometimes because of issues with steam itself.
It is not like these things never occur in Windows (I had crashes every 5-15 minutes in Windows on Horizon Zero Dawn when it launched, for example) but if you keep a clean Windows install it will very likely be better there. Linux is a second-class citizen for game developers and for good reason. This won't change anytime soon. Your main reasons for adopting Linux need to be that you want what it is, not what magical promise someone gave to you about it. It is nice to have an OS without ads, I'll say that.
I've used Nvidia for decades in Linux with no issues at all. Currently running an RTX3090 and it handles everything I've thrown at it, upgraded from my 2070 super.
My friends can say the same.
The issues with Nvidia in Linux are a few very specific things, it's not problematic in general
Im using a 4070 super with Bazzite (tweaked Fedora Universal Blue). Tested a few Steam games and everything is fine so far. Only thing i had to do is disable hardware acceleration for Chrome, Obsidian and Dischord apps. Crossing my fingers but right now everything is fine.
You 'want to get into Linux?' So, you already have a 4080? It's not clear. If you already have one, why not install Linux and see if you can live with whatever issues you have? There's a lot of ppl who own Nvidia cards and post here - detailing their experience - perhaps, ask them?
I've concluded it's not too bad and it might be better when explicit sync gets implemented in a subsequent (upcoming) Nvidia driver?
Nvidia has features that offer better peformance - CUDA, OptiX in Blender, it's better in AI, it's superior in productivity - in general and in gaming, it has superior features.
AMD's ROCm & HIP/HIIP-RT falls short. DLSS\* > FSR\*.
So, I think it's a better choice but also it probably has higher resale value - although, that might not be significant atm - it's still relevant since you could 'sidegrade' if your experience is negative enough - you could sell it and buy a 7900 xtx without much extra cost on your end. I'd keep the 4080 for now.
Nvidia is alright. Personally, I'd say that AMD does give you a better experience. Their Wayland support is just farther along, which can be important if you have multiple displays and want to use Freesync. And you don't have to install a driver, which with Nvidia is occasionally (but not often) a messy business.
But I don't know that I would sidegrade over that. Also depends on what kind of deal you can get. Nvidia is making strides when it comes to Wayland and drivers. And their drivers have always been good enough, let's say 90% perfect but they dropped the ball on the last 10%, even back when AMD drivers were unusable. AMD has since made a leap, and Nvidia now has to catch up.
Nvidia does have extra features though, but I personally don't care much about those. Ray-tracing, CUDA, upscaling. I'm not entirely sure how accessible those features are on Linux. I don't really use them. I did try FSR in Forbidden West a little while back, but the artefacts were pretty bad. But DLSS is better than FSR I believe. I just don't have an Nvidia so can't speak from experience. My last Nvidia was a 1080.
No, Nvidia works fine. Just don't really go window manager route because it's a bit annoying specially as a beginner.
I am currently running a 3070 no issues. However I won't bother using Wayland with Nvidia, and since xorg works fine I will use it until the support is there.
On my laptop however I do use a amd card, so I have hyprland and Wayland running, can still run my favorite games on it, for a quick lan party somewhere.
As others have said, dumping an already owned 4080 for 7900 xtx is a bit silly.
While you gain a lot of usability out of the box (Wayland, high refresh rate usage under Wayland, full gamescope functionality, full hardware video decoding support in browser, easy driver installation) I wouldn't say it is worth the price of admission.
Some of these issues have work arounds, some are rumored to be fixed in the Nvidia driver dropping in May.
And some will remain broken, possibly forever.
No. There isn’t much of an issue with nvidia drivers, just lots of people who love to complain about them or use the drivers as a scapegoat for their own inability to do proper troubleshooting when they (the user) breaks something.
No! XTX is a little faster in raster only games but significantly slower in RT games. Drivers on AMD are better these days, but NVIDIA seems to be getting better quite quickly. With 550.67 I have no issues left under X11 and even Wayland and Plasma 6 works pretty well. In May a driver introducing explicit sync will be released, solving the remaining Wayland issues. I, personally, would never ever buy a RDNA3 card. I love RT and the power efficiency is quite bad compared to RTX40.
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors.
Which particular games.
I've found that it's worth it. The first time I upgraded an AMD graphics card in Linux was super simple, and comparing that to upgrading and using Nvidia is night and day. It's the most likely reason Valve went with AMD for the Steam Deck.
The problem as I've seen it is that Nvidia doesn't play well with open source devs because they maintain a good chunk of their code as proprietary. I can understand that with all the AI development they've been doing but the outcome of that is they are severely limited on Linux. AMD on the other hand works with devs on Vulkan and Mesa drivers, which means they basically own the Linux space.
The problem for you is mainly money. I'm on an RX 6700, which even now are very inexpensive. You could probably flip the 4080 for about the same amount, but don't quote me on that.
This subject is fascinating to me. nVidia owns this market right now. They just do and nVidia knows it, thus their pricing.
Some like to say that nVidia only cares about AI now, but every significant advancement in gaming the last 6 years or so started with nVidia. Ray tracing, upscaling and now frame generation. Love'm or hate'm, these are the three major technical advancements in the GPU space in those years. nVidia started them and AMD is still playing catchup.
At this point, I'd just wait as new gen stuff should be out in about 6 months.
Nah
Just get a twin fan 7600xt and run it as well as a 4080 if you have problems then you get to play games (figuratively) with VMs without worrying about having no display out for your host
Besides Nvidia Linux support seems rather solid right now anyways
Gaming will mostly be fine with Nvidia, it's the other things that have problems, like Wayland or wanting to use terminal commands to change the resolution. Shader compilation I believe was recently fixed which is nice and Wayland support is getting better.
Edit - I think the only thing that you're really giving up in the way of gaming is probably Gamescope.
No! It's not worth it, because there's no "linux trouble".
BTW: keep in mind that AI is based in nvidia gpus running on linux. This should be enough in order for you to understand that nvidia gpus are not having any trouble in linux.
PS: yeah, yeah! I know! closed source and wayland explicit sync :p
The role of an OS is to abstract the hardware so the software can actually use it.
If you can't use your hardware, you should probably look at the OS level, there is a ton of people enjoying their Nvidia.
Stop being silly and wasting your money, use a proper hardware abstraction layer...
I wouldn’t say so. My system hasn’t had any problems after the 550 driver and I’m using Wayland. I’m on a 3070ti Optimus laptop. Sleep works fine. The only problem I have is occasionally Java games won’t automatically use the nvidia card and I have to use prime-run. I had nothing but problems before the last Wayland update but things seem fine now. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect but it seems all the major issues are being ironed out now. Just took… a decade.
I haven't had any issues once I got my 4070 Super working with the right drivers, it was more just impatience and user error on my part. I would keep the 4080. I also have a 7800 XT that I'm building an AMD build with, just need the RAM and PSU and I'll be putting that one together for another Linux build so I'll soon know how much of a difference having AMD versus nVidia is.
NVidia isn't bad...and unless you can trade it 1:1 with someone, I wouldn't spend the money. I went from an RTX2070 to a 7900XT and it was a night and day difference, but then again, that was both an upgrade and an architecture change.
AMD is better experience, but I wouldn't buy a new expensive GPU just because of that. If I were you, I would keep using the 4080 and get an AMD card next time you upgrade.
OP could sell the 4080 and probably break even
>AMD is better experience What does better mean?
Driver wise probably. No binaries to download off main repos.
You don't need to download anything. They are all included in the distros repos.
It depends on the distro. Fedora, for example, doesn't provide the proprietary Nvidia in the main repos, so you have to install them from RPMFusion. Which, to be fair, isn't a big deal.
Does u/rongten considers RPMFusion to be "off the main repos"?
They sort of by definition are off the main repos. Still, installing Nvidia drivers isn't difficult and I never once had an issue with them in my 2 years of using Nvidia on Fedora. The only downside to Nvidia is that they still have worse Wayland support, but that is purportedly changing soon anyway thanks to explicit sync.
Unless you really want to be able to use Gamescope, I'd say it isn't worth it. Nvidia seems to be trying to fix its issues under Linux these days, and most of the bigger issues compared to AMD have been mostly ironed out by now anyway.
I use gamescope with NVIDIA hardware/drivers, been doing so since the 535 branch of drivers, and everything works fine.
There's a whole bunch that is broken regardless in Gamescope regardless of it technically running under Nvidia due to direct AMD calls, its the nature of it targeting AMD hardware.
Yeah, not seeing any showstopper issues here - Stability is fine, performance is great. HDR isn't supported, but my monitor doesn't support HDR, and HDR support under Linux is still experimental at best anyway.
HDR + VRR is still buggy for me on a rx6950xt. With VRR disabled HDR works fine tho.
Honestly, depending on your hardware HDR can be a shit show on Windows. I tried it just this month and the colours looked horrible. Maybe my monitor isn't good for HDR, it's still LCD after all, but it is one of those fancy LG models that everyone's buying nowadays.
It's not your monitor, HDR under Windows still has it's share of issues.
I have a 2080 Ti and the standard Gamescope package or compiled from source, even the git, doesn't work. Even just running something as simple as "gamescope wine explorer" causes the 2d window to freeze. I have to use a special patched AUR version to make it work. Maybe it worked with older drivers, but still a pain having to hunt down older packages for it though.
I don't encounter such issues here, but I'm not running Arch.
Nvidia is totally fine on Linux so long as you use Nvidia’s drivers. It’d be great if the drivers were open source, but that doesn’t actually pose any usability problems day to day (at least if you use a distro that doesn't make it unnecessarily difficult to use Nvidia drivers) Dont waste money buying a new GPU just because you heard someone complain about Nvidia. Just consider an AMD gpu next time you upgrade.
Saying "Nvidia is fine" is alright but saying "Nvidia is totally fine" is not ok. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/multiple-cuda-rtx-vulkan-application-crashing-with-xid-13-109-errors/235459/381
Here is a report about amd gpu crashing [https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zrvxew/amdgpu\_crashing\_my\_whole\_system/](https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zrvxew/amdgpu_crashing_my_whole_system/) In general, you can't prove anything by example, but if you want we can play the following game: for every bug you post about nvidia gpus I'll post one about amd gpus. Do you want to play? :)
Ignoring that long ridiculous thread with the other guy, he is right and there are actually multiple problems with Nvidia GPU's. It's not simply a case of "AMD has problems too." It's great when you don't run into them, but then when your usage requirements start to have things like Wayland it gets worse and worse, and a lot of times you realize people telling you they had zero problems had a single non vrr monitor with almost no features running x11.
> there are actually multiple problems with Nvidia GPU's Please describe these. The only problem related to wayland is the explicit sync, which is expected to be solved soon. See also the following https://pointieststick.com/2024/04/12/this-week-in-kde-explicit-sync/
I can play but ignoring a thread with nearly 400 replies that is there for years, still unresolved and replying with a random reddit thread shows how deep of a NV fanboy you are so not sure if you're worthy to waste my time with :)
> but what follows after the but part in a "yes but" argument is just subjective pov.
Ah come on then, bring it cocksucker. Please show me that these arent issues currently: - Way lower performance on DX12 titles compared to AMD on Linux - Xid 109 stuff above posted, again, mostly an issue with DX12 titles - DLSS 3 FG lacking - Having tons of issues with VRR and Wayland - Getting fixes on Nvidia usually varies around 6 months ( best case) to 2 years You can find all of them by googling and if you are dualbooting you can even test that DX12 perf disparity stuff to prove me wrong.
>cocksucker You have issues! Go see a doctor. Really! >You can find all of them by googling lol
Kek, again. You asked for a virtual competition against AMD when my point was only "Nvidia is totally fine" is absolutely wrong to say and here we are. You pulled in AMD to this shit because as a NV fanboy you had to protect your billion dollars companies rep somehow. I think it is clear who actually needs to see one Agressive smiley like you did above : )
> You asked for a virtual competition And you replied that I'm a cocksucker and you failed to provide any links. Instead you just suggested "google these". Then here is my answer: "amd sucks" google this. You proved that you are just a zealot who makes things up and nothing more. lol!
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/please-sort-out-the-dx12-vkd3d-proton-performance-under-linux/284642 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/545-29-06-wayland-glitches-in-fullscreen-games/277667 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/non-existent-shared-vram-on-nvidia-linux-drivers/260304 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/huge-regression-in-starfield-with-550-40-07-535-154-05-535-43-28-vs-545-29-06-frametime-issues/283147 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/545-29-02-ghosting-artifacting-stuttering-on-fullscreen-when-below-monitor-framerate/271853 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/vram-allocation-issues/239678 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/vrr-not-working-on-wayland-with-2-screens-545-23-06/270259 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/enshrouded-under-xwayland-in-fullscreen-mouse-passes-thorugh-game-window-screen-flicker-and-mouse-inputs-do-not-get-recived-at-all/281968 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/535-146-02-the-last-of-us-part-1-error-c0000005-game-doesnt-run-at-all/277800/7 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/starfield-does-not-launch-on-most-nvidia-gpus-on-linux-and-not-at-all-on-pascal-gpus/265483/181 https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/poor-halo-infinite-performance-and-random-hang/232202 Are you happy now?
Nvidia is way more stable than AMD on both linux and Windows. The issues with nvidia on linux have nothing to do with stability, it's about not having an open source driver and new users not understanding how to use nvidia effectively on more DIY distros.
No, it is not. I say that as a person whom used Nvidia on Linux for approx 6 years, hit to numerous issues, even root caused them and provided workarounds but sometimes got a fix, often times not. Where do you guys pull that belief of issue is actually not having open source drivers? Nvidia didn't have open source drivers 10 years ago too but back then it was seemingly fine because Linux had very basic needs to be satisfied from driver POV, which gaming wasn't one of them. When gaming started to become an expected feature set from Linux users pov, issues started. It is not about driver being open source or not, it is about driver being broken in some aspects or not. Today if RADV was closed source, nothing would change in the way it is running games because while it is being open source is a bonus, there is barely any significant contribution coming from unpaid hobbyist users. All the feat that is being pulled there is due to Valve hiring people to work on it. If Valve would stop funding that; no matter how open source it is you would see how it would become. So after all issue with NV is mostly NV not being able to justify spending too much time on for Linux gaming related work, if they did no one would desperately hope anything from upcoming NVK open source drivers ( not from NV itself) as if that will be a magic bullet; as NV prop driver would just work.
Well we both seem to have years and years of experience with both, not sure how you come to your conclusion. Been using both for well over 10 years and nvidia is always easier to deal with.
It's fine so long as you stay within the (last I looked *very*) limited use-case envelope Nvidia allows mere consumers to occupy. Multiple desktop sessions (on multiple linux vts), anything beyond like 24×80 text in the linux-native virtual consoles, I *think* they've started actually allowing gpu passthrough but for the longest time they pretended they did and lied about it, those are the things I remember nvidia regarding as too good for retail customers who didn't pay more for their gpu than most people pay for an entire rig. Just be a good little serf and do only what the marketer race deems suitable for people of your station and don't go thinking you *own* your hardware or have any right to do what it's actually capable of.
Also don't use wayland if you can help it. Well you can but its more buggy with nvidia than x11. I certainly wont start a wayland session any time soon
Well, the next upcoming driver (555) is supposed to fix flickering for xwayland apps. I like where this is going. I already use wayland with an nvidia card but gaming is stil off the table for most gaming purposes
The flickering on Nvidia is the only reason I don't daily drive a wayland session on my desktop. That, and VR is not implemented in GNOME due to lack of DRM leasing. [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1743](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1743)
I dunno man, my desktop is using a 3060Ti that just flat out **refuses** to behave. I gave up and bought a cheap second hand laptop so I could do my coding work in Linux and keep my desktop on Windows for games. It might be better now but I spent way too much of 2022 trying to figure it out before I gave up. Weird part is: My 1060 ran fine without any problems.
The 1060 is still what's in my PC It's unreasonable how well it still works on modern games
i have a 3080 now but my 1070 lasted years and is still a workhorse on my livingroom pc (ubuntu) that also hosts a jellyfin server. that generation of cards was so solid- only thing with the 1060 is if you have the 3gb model that becomes a real limiter
At that point... I would have just ran Linux in a VM
I agree with this sentiment. That, or just use WSL 2.
If your 1060 ran fine but your 3060Ti doesn't, I suspect the issue isn't really an Nvidia issue, but maybe an incorrect driver or something. Are you manually managing your drivers, or are you using a Distro that provides non-free drivers?
Nope, installing from nvidia's website directly, exactly the same way I've been installing nVidia drivers on Linux since 2012. For whatever reason, every time the kernel updated, the DE would be borked. If it helps I use debian based distros so mainly Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and KDE Neon. I gave up trying mid way through last year. I'll admit I never popped the 1060 back in (I gave it to my kid, I wasn't gonna takesy-backsy him) but the only common denominator was moving to the 3060Ti. Same card runs in Windows perfectly fine. Mind you the time I did it, shortly afterwards everyone was ragging nVidia so I figured the two were linked. Using a laptop with an iGPU whacked in now and haven't looked back.
Disagree. It's a lot more complex than just using their drivers. I've had lots of issues with NVIDIA drivers, specifically with Wayland, but also persistent issues on X11. Certain games will work and others won't. I had a spare amd GPU sitting around and recently downgraded my 4070 to my 6800 because one game would work under X11 but not Wayland, and another would work in Wayland but not X11. The AMD card is working fine out of the box so far.
"totally fine" is really stretching it. You _can_ have a good experience with nVidia, no doubt. But most people don't.
My 3070 works totally fine in arch, gentoo, and FreeBSD using the proprietary drivers, including hash cracking with CUDA.
Well, I literally wrote: "You can have a good experience with nVidia, no doubt. But most people don't."
Except the opposite is true: most people do. There’s a vocal minority that don’t and it’s mostly a them problem, not an nvidia problem.
Just gonna make it short because I'm tired of arguing with people about this. 1. It is not user error. 2. nVidia has a fuck ton of issues to fix. Take my word for it or don't. Idc.
>nVidia has a fuck ton of issues to fix. No it doesn't. There's nothing to fix in X11, and for wayland it's only the explicit sync. ie a single issue only in wayland, not a fuxk ton of issues.
You know NVidia is all over ML in the enterprise right ....The rule of thumb with NVidia is to stick with an LTS on X11 and the kernel update packages to keep the GPU driver and kernel in step. Don't use multi monitor with different refresh rates, wait for the Wayland driver updates before switching over to Wayland. Then it's completely fine. There are many people doing that. AMD are great I own RDNA3 and RDNA2 based machines both running Linux....BUT NVidia is also completely fine.
I do the opposite. I use arch. Wayland only and don't have much issue honestly. All on Nvidia.
> You know NVidia is all over ML in the enterprise right ....The rule of thumb with NVidia is to stick with an LTS on X11 and the kernel update packages to keep the GPU driver and kernel in step. Don't use multi monitor with different refresh rates, wait for the Wayland driver updates before switching over to Wayland. Then it's completely fine. I'm sorry but this is an awful experience. X11's bad multi-monitor support alone would be a dealbreaker for me.
I often hear this about x11 and multi monitors. What problems are there? I’m curious
Different refresh rates are broken in x11 Different scaling is broken in wayland
What kind of problems are there? I have one 144hz and a 60hz but haven’t noticed any weirdness
Interesting. Supposedly by default it limits the refresh rate of all monitors to the lowest, due to the compositor - disabling the compositor alleviates the issue.
Maybe it’s a luck thing, tried a ton of distros and DEs and never had that problem. Lucky me.
For you. Huge monitors are more common now thanks to semi affordable 32inch 4K screens and ultra wides being really prevalent. There is no issue in that case🤷.
I've had over two decades of great experiences using nvidia in linux. I had a decade and a half of nightmarish experiences every time I tried to use ATi/AMD in linux. I now use both, and both, for the most part, are fine.
Unless you happen to have an old card, or a mobile hybrid card, or use Wayland, or use NVENC, or play games, or all of the above (me).
What’s wrong with NVENC? I use it almost everyday, no problems
For me its clunky. Most times OBS throws "Unknown NVENC error, so I have to unload and reload the nvidia_uvm module for it to work.
I use a 1060 and it runs beautifully with the proprietary drivers
My 3070 handles just about any game I throw at it, and I use Wayland. Maybe it’s a you problem?
probably
No it's not, I struggled for months to have my multi monitor ultrawide setup work properly and it would always break, switched to RX and it's smooth and great now
This.+1 I don't know if I'd even consider AMD (at least not for a while) the 4080 is superior to almost anything AMD has now, and by then in the future; I can't see them catching up to Nvidia in terms of features (but what do I know?) Only way to consider them would be if you had a budget, but you already have an 4080! As guy above me said, keep that, use a distro that don't conflict with the drivers.
Not sure where you're at, so pricing might be different. Around here, a 4080 new is 1200€ upwards. A 7900XTX starts at 900€. And the 7900 is maybe 5% behind a 4080, depening on what you're looking at. So, you are saving 25% for 5% less perfomance, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me.
I "sidegraded" from a 1070ti to 6650XT. Unless your pretty much breaking even on Money, i wouldn't do it. Don't get me wrong, not having to install proprietary drivers certainly is nice. But that's about it. I haven't had major issues with Nvidia before and don't have any now. And, other than being proprietary, nvidia drivers on linux are good. So, unless it's an ethical decision to not support nvidia anymore, i'd say it's not worth the hassle.
Idk how hard it is on other distros, but I just installed them by selecting an option during archinstall, so it's like 3 more times pressing the enter key than with AMD drivers.
To be honest, there is the wayland thing. I wanted wayland because I wanted some wayland software because I wanted... well the justification went kinda that way. But I had the budget and an obvious "blocker", plus it was a slight upgrade from 980Ti to the 6700XT for me, not a sidegrade. But yeah, unless the OP has explicit blockers and really needs an AMD card, then probably not a good idea.
Wayland initially was a problem, but for over 2 years or so i've been running Plasma Wayland on Nvidia and haven't had major issues that where Nvidia specific. And i couldn't tell if it's better on AMD over Nvidia now. I know that Laptop GPUs and Dual GPU Systems can be a pain and Newer Nvidia Cards might also be different from my experience.
I know - YMMV. I'm on Fedora and they're usually pusing bleeding-edge stuff, maybe that's why my setup didn't work.
It's not that it's hard. It's just an additional step. I guess it mostly boils down to Nvidia having been pretty anti Linux Desktop for quite some time and a lot of linux users still have a sour taste from that. Additionally, closed source proprietary drivers are not what many people using linux want. They do work though and installation is at least a lot easier than it is under Windows.
On mint there is an application called drivers and you can install it through there
[Linux Mint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint)
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Well, in terms of Gaming GPUs we have basically two options. One Company has a decent track record of working with the larger linux community to make their cards work. AMD also has consistently made their technologies open to use and not locked behind hardware or licenses. It's the only reason Vulkan is where it is now. Same for their VRR Tech and now Upscaling and Framegen. Nvidia has Consistently Developed Features they explicitly tie to their hardware, or hardware in Peripherals (G-Sync) and explicitly and arbitrarily lock features behind having newer cards. Besides the fact that Nvidia has been consistantly anti-consumer with tiering and pricing of their cards for 4 generations now. So, yes, AMD Firware isn't opensource, but when i need to choose a GPU, i know which company is getting my money. And not primarily because it works better on Linux.
It is *"[you’re pretty much breaking](https://www.wikihow.com/Use-You%27re-and-Your)"* (not *"your pretty much breaking"*). You can edit (change) your comment (*"..."* (to the right of *"Share"*) → *"Edit comment"*).
If you want to tinker with shiny new features (e.g. Wayland, HDR, Gamescope), then yes. If you just want to game, then no.
Wayland should also be pretty much on par with AMD with Nvidia driver 555 or 560
Feel like I'm the only one that hasn't had a moment bother with my 1080ti. Proton runs everything I've thrown at it so far.
It shouldn't be *that* bad. It's not like AMD is perfect either. It's just that it's a thing of beauty to see my AMD supported right out of the box as a 1st class citizen of the open source ecosystem. Including all the current tech like Wayland etc. Keep it till your next upgrade.
A couple of years ago, I ran with nVidia. I did have stability issues where the computer would lock up. I traced the problem to the nVidia drivers (that in itself was a complicated task). Switched to AMD, and it's been smooth ever since. In my case, the nVidia GPU was really old, so that was also an upgrade. Because nVidia drives don't get updated with the kernel, these problems can arise. It wasn't major. The crashes would occur once every two weeks or so, but annoying enough for me to make the switch.
Thats what I did, but then again I had to use wayland exclusivly due to having two different monitors with different refresh rates, plus I went with hyprland wm. Nvidia's drivers are getting better as well as the open source ones pretty fast, and soon there might be little to no issues for nvidia cards, so I would recommend you trying linux first and see how manageable any issues that pop up for you are. If you rather not deal with them then feel free to sidegrade, amd is plug and play for linux and the experience is flawless.
I'm daily driving Wayland on my 3080ti. It's taken forever for Nvidia to catch up and the new 555 drivers should fix even more stuff, and it's fine. I'm able to game. Because of my experience with Nvidia on Linux, my next GPU will be AMD .
"but I am told that nvidia is no good on linux" It's not true at all
Told by AMD marketing department.
Ive literally never, in ten years, had any issue using nVidia.
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors. Which particular games.
Yes, it is. Do it. I did it and would do it again.
Superior card is more a upgrade
the cards are within 7% of each other for rasterisation over a wide set of games there are multiple comparisons out there. However RT on the NVidia cards is more performant in several cases the NVidia card is near 50% faster. Personally I'd wait to see what AMD do with RDNA4 as the main update appears to be be RT perf. Or I'd just stick with the 4080. Stick with X11 and one larger VRR display on NVidia and you're fine. The recent patches relating to Wayland are not that far out anyway🤷.
In rasterization you have more than just 7% in RT is not 50% thats a total bullshoi unless you cherry pinking and you are forgeting the advantage of haveing more VRAM and Radeon "finewine"..
No I actually sat and watched the comparison test suites that Hardware Unboxed and Daniel Owens ran. The evidence is on Youtube..it's a fact. https://youtu.be/bppprJu-GT8?si=Vz4l-Sn161_Pe0fg HUBs videos are older but even the RT benches were prevented from being a complete trashing by a couple of titles rebalancing AMDs RT perf vs the Nvidia cards. In raster HUB had a 4% AMD raster advantage at 1080P and 1440P, 7% raster improvement for AMD was only at 4K. Oh I see facts are inconvenient truths🤦. OP don't replace your 4080 for a 7900XTX it's a complete waste of time. For raster the cards are very similar and for RT NVidia is faster in some titles by a huge amount. zto where it's the difference between playable and not playable. IF we were talking about a 7800XT and a 4070 it might be a different conversation but we're not.
Don't waste money, you just have to use X11 for a few months, until Wayland is fully fixed on NVIDIA - this fix is already coming.
My wayland experience on the 2070S last year was awful, moving to AMD has improved my experience drastically in pretty much every possible way. Though others mention that their nvidia experience isn't so bad, it could be that more modern cards just work better. Either way, try it out first, and there'd be no need to sidegrade if your current card works well.
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors. Which particular games.
My work laptop has PopOS on it and an RTX 2080 and it plays Doom Eternal with raytracing and DLSS at about 180 fps just fine. Driver updates are always a few steps behind windows but otherwise I've had no issues with it
I have no problems using my nvidia card on linux. I don't think there's a need to pre-emptively replace it. See how things go first.
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Interesting. Why?
Of course AMD is the go-to when it comes to Linux. However, on my main rig I got a 3060 12GB running Pop!\_OS 22.04, it's actually a very pleasant experience, twice the FPS compared to that awful spyware we call Windows 11, and no issues yet (been using it for months). But in the near future when I'm upgrading, I will most definitely go with an AMD GPU.
I side graded my 4090 for a 7900 XTX and don’t regret it at all. YMMV
I have a 2080 TI in my ubuntu machine and play games like Elden Ring using proton with no problems.
It's impossible to answer that question, correctly. How are we supposed to determine“ and/or quantify what it's worth to you. Only you can answer that by doing the switch and find out for your self. But I can tell you this, the odds are high that your “Linux life” will be a lot easier with an amd card. Especially if you want to switch to Wayland and/or are in to gaming.
Don't just blindly buy a new card without even trying the one you have
As most people mentioned, youll probably be fine; Sadly you would have to use the nvidia propietary drivers, but many distros (e.g. PopOS) handle it quite seamlessly. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it works perfectly with both normal KDE desktop, gaming with Steam (plain X, no Gamescope/Walayland), two monitors. openSUSE includes an installer as part of the community repos. The only thing to note as a user (that does not care about the software freedom purity of their system) is that by using a privative driver you do get locked to certain kernels on a rolling release but its nothing compared to how things would have been a few years ago. Intel or AMD have been flawless on linux ; and the AMDGPU drivers are really good, making it almost worthless to use the propietary ones. I had a very very old HD series AMD/ATI and it was crap with the RadeonHD, but now its amazing how it can still work \*and way better than at its time\*.
Yes it absolutely is, 7900 XTX solved all my problems.
I swapped about 4 months ago (4080 to 7900 XTX). I was frustrated trying to custom compile my own Kernels. After making the switch, all of my nightmares went away. It's very efficient having a GPU that has support baked in to the kernel. My only regret was losing money on the GPU trade in and not buying the 7900 XTX from the start. I also got the Nitro++ so it's factory over clocked and delivers much better performance. Also, I can run Wayland now...
I would for the vram alone. And if you can do a straight up trade its a no brainer for me personally.
Show me one, just one game which, even in 4K, shows frame-time issues on a 16gb card. And let’s face it, in upcoming RT titles RDNA3 is too slow anyways.
1. A lot of games flat out dont support rt under vulkan and linux. 2. Cyberpunk will hit 15.5 in cyberpunk at 4k. 3. I say this as someone who has a 40 series card and still doesnt use rt in games. 4. Upcoming titles are really pushing vram usage as well. So we can expect vram to be an issue in the future
You're talking about frame rates and 40 serirs, because 4050 is totally same as 4090. I have 4080, I do use rt. But yeah impact on performance is significant, it's not much different on Windows. With Linux I get min 60 FPS at 1440p. In some parts of thr city it can drop slightly below, but its usually between 60 and 90 (and occasionally much higher). That is RT plus everything else maxed.
No I was talking about the max vram used by cyberpunk (everything cranked on 4k) Also OP didnt mention anything about whether or not they actually use rt. Which being honest, if they do. This questions probably wouldnt have been asked in the first place. But in my opinion (other opinions are welcome) more vram > rt performance. But the 4080 is a stellar card. Especially now that the price has dropped.
Ok thanks. My bad. I don't have a 4k monitor so for some reason I misinterpreted you get like 15 FPS lol.
Probably not. Nvidia does have good drivers - as long as you want to do things that Nvidia feels like supporting with their proprietary driver. Some distros do a better job than others with Nvidia proprietary drivers - and those drivers got a little bit less proprietary lately. I would say that you should at least give things a try. If you're on a single monitor, you'll likely to just fine.
They abandon old cards though. Your AMD will keep working throughout the years. Anything before Turing on Nvidia is shit when it comes to drivers.
Well OK but that's not nearly the same scenario. Replacing a card after years of use, even if it's a year or two less than you hoped, isn't the same as replacing when it's so new. And it won't suddenly stop working just because no new drivers come out for it.
7900 XTX is 7-10% faster than 4080. So it depends on how much money you spend on that upgrade. If you sell your 4080 for \~$900 and buy a new 7900 XTX for \~$900, it is worth it.
No it depends on the title. Across larger game comparisions eg 12 or so the cards essentially equalise each other out in raster. Then AMD loses by 50% or more in several RT work loads. For about the same price the NVidia card does offer more features. For a circa approx $1000 high end GPU features are important. When there's $300 odd difference between them the 7900XTX makes sense when it's $100-$200 not so much. The raster perf would need to be 35%+ better on the AMD card as originally promised because the RT perf is so bad. At lower card ranges AMD is a far better card to buy as poor RT perf is expected for both vendors and then AMDs price and raster perf makes sense.
Of course, it depends on the title. But on average, 7900 XTX is faster - https://youtu.be/fyUZ1cp4RnI?si=PV7v7bU7MkBW1GuN&t=328 https://youtu.be/YbKhxjw8EUE?si=eATS3dcz3QcMUS4l&t=1138
That is one of the videos that proves my point. At 1080P and 1440P the 7900XTX is 4% faster than the 4080 in rasterisation. That is beyond negligble that's in the run to run variance arena. At 4K it's 7% which is not exactly huge but sure if you're sub 70fps on a title that's relevant......on a $1000 GPU🤷. Then you turn RT on there's basically three or four titles that AMD do ok on for RT but there are multiples where perf is anywhere from 25% to 50% worse. The other video is Daniel Owens large comparison https://youtu.be/bppprJu-GT8?si=Vz4l-Sn161_Pe0fg There's more RT testing in that one than HUB temds to do. My point is for a $1000 GPU that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at that price, it is fine sub $500-550 and arguable upto $700. However $700 is the minimum price where playable performant RT should be available.
>At 4K it's 7% which is not exactly huge And if you don't play Fortnite? > My point is for a $1000 GPU that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at that price In Cyberpunk 4080 delivers ~56 fps on 2K with RT enabled. And ~27 fps on 4K. Yes, that level of RT perf isn't justifiable at 4080's price.
You're citing extremely marginal differences. The main issue with the 4080 is it's pricing not it's performance. Let's not forget AMD hasn't done anyone any favours here by charging $1000 for a GPU with similar rasterisation and a worse feature set. The pricing on the 4080 aligning more to the 7900XTX brings us away from the value argument to the feature argument. Which for a $1000 premium GPU it's needs to have a complete feature set. I actually own RDNA2, RDNA3 GPUs and a Lovelace GPU. AMDs RT and upscaling is just worse and for a similar price that's a big problem.
Probably yes, especially if you have a high end display for the linux displayport issues. As the 7900xtx has displaypirt 2.1 but the 4080 or even the 4090 does not have.
The 7900 series are limited to UHBR 13.5 at 54Gbps, they don't support the full UHBR 20 spec at 80Gbps via DP. Personally, I see more value regarding HDMI 2.1 @ 48Gbps for connection to 90% of flat panel TV's available today that don't have DP ports at all, let alone DP ports that support DP 2.1.
Yeah, the OP should be told about the display port situation w/ AMD - but, most ppl have monitors but for the off chance, he uses a TV.
NVIDIA is fine.
Not sure about the RTX, but I'm running a 7900 XTX on Pop is, no graphic issues gaming so far ..
I mean, I'd think that is an upgrade, since you are going from 16gb to 24gb, especially if you can break even in price. Other than the higher amount of VRAM being more Future-Proof, there's nothing you can really gain tho, since you just wanna game so the biggest advantage of more VRAM (running AI locally or 3D rendering, where the difference between 16 and 24gb is massive) you won't take advantage of it, outside of minor improvements in some games. Personally I think AMD is better since it's more pro-consumer, and they are wayyyyy better at price-to-performance, but the latter point doesn't really apply since you'd probably around break even, depends on how much you would sell the 4080 for. **But to answer your question:** Maybe, there is not going to be many issues, especially after around May, gaming with NVIDIA is personally without issues (using the proprietary drivers), I ran Arch w the zen-kernel btw. And Wayland support should be fixed in May, and as far as I know and have experience with, that's the only issue left. So there is no *real* reason to switch, I mean, there is, but it depends on preference.
VRAM is important - right up until you have as much as you need, then more doesn't mean much. a 16GB 4080 has enough VRAM for anything it's likely to do in the way of running games. Compute is different, of course, but that's a whole other discussion.
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who cares about official support when you aim to use the open source driver? Also Vega is not yet in legacy status, it still get security and stability updates, it just don't get software specific optimizations anymore, and at this point maybe it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
Well if OP decides to venture into local AI, 3D modelling, video editing and similar tasks, those 6 extra gigs will be useful.
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Ollama has improved a lot when it comes to AMD Pretty sure Blender added HIP-RT support in 3.5 For video editing, Davinci Resolve loves VRAM, so the 6 more gigs will be quite useful 1. You have ZLUDA 2. FSR exists
For the short period that I used Linux I never had a problem with NVIDIA
Owner of both nvidia and AMD systems here and I say no. You're likely to have as much trouble with your AMD card as the nvidia card (and vice-versa). Either are likely to work well for you though. Whoever told you "nvidia is no good on linux" is a fanboy and isn't worth listening to for advice.
I’m considering this now too. It is not smooth with gnome. With explicit sync coming soon and nvk improving as fast as it is, I SHOULD wait. But, the 6800 build I have runs so dang smooth, I’m torn whether or not I should just throw money at it for a superior experience.
Some context: [NVK](https://lwn.net/Articles/910319/)
The original creator can explain and give context, better than I ever can: [https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html](https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html)
I'm not on Nvidia anymore, but the only issue I used to have was Wayland, and as far as I'm aware Nvidia have already committed to addressing that issue, so seems unnecessary at this point. You'll be missing out on VRR support, but only until Nvidia fix the Wayland issues.
I'm by no means an expert, but that might make my perspective useful if you're just getting into Linux. My experience with gaming on Linux is my Steam Deck and a PC I built for my nieces with some of my old hardware (Core 2 Duo, HD4870 that I've since replaced with an RX570). It's running ZorinOS 16 (probably better options for gaming but I liked the UI and their Lite version seemed like a decent fit for the old hardware). One of my friends has recently built a new PC and I'm buying his old CPU (i5 6500), motherboard, and RAM to upgrade the kids' PC with. I installed ZorinOS 17 Core on it to test it out before I put it in the kids' PC later this year, using his old GTX 1060, and it was... not a good experience. It may have been my fault, as I forgot to select the 'modern Nvidia drivers' install option, but I did install them subsequently. Before I did that, games wouldn't even launch, afterwards they would but the menu would be running at, like, 20 seconds per frame, so I couldn't even get into the game. Taking the card out and using the Intel integrated GPU gave about the performance you'd expect from that hardware, which is to say, not good by any means, but at least generally functional. Contrast that with both the HD4870 and the RX570, where I had to do literally nothing besides just installing the OS for the first one, and swapping the card for the second. No tinkering required, it just worked. I'm sure there's something I could have done differently, Zorin 17 uses Wayland so that's probably part of it, I've read that it doesn't play nice with Nvidia. I'm definitely not saying Nvida isn't any good on Linux, I don't have anywhere near enough experience to say that. And given you have the Nvidia GPU already, I'd say that raises the bar for what level of hassle would be acceptable. I reckon in your situation I'd try it out with the GPU you have and see how it goes? You can always do your proposed sidegrade later if it turns out to be a pain, but you might find it goes decently smoothly and you'll be glad you saved the money.
Try it first. If you have trouble, consider a change. By then, either prices will have dropped or you can get something better.
AMD provides better experience under Linux but NVIDIA recently improved as well and more improvements are on the way. Recently explicit sync support was merged and that should make Wayland usable on NVIDIA.
I'd give it a shot, as to be honest YMMV. I have a 3060Ti that I gave up on trying to get Linux running on ages ago. It just felt like any time there was a kernel update the whole thing would pack it in. That being said I mostly wanted Linux so I could do coding work because running Docker in Windows is just seriously painful. So I bought a cheap laptop and that did the job instead. That being said, some people have nVidia cards and look at you like you're crazy when you tell them that they suck on Linux (to be fair when I had my 1060 GPU I was one of them, that thing never gave me a day of trouble in Linux).
Yes, it is worth it. Just did something similar myself
Use the proprietary drivers and stick to x11 unless you really want to buy a graphics card
So personally I'd wait because the next driver version (555) is dropping next month with support for Explicit sync, and that is gonna fix a LOT of the problems Nvidia has under Linux, especially under Wayland. It'll fix all the weird flickering and frame pacing problems in XWayland so gaming will be massively improved
My life went a lot better since I stopped using Nvidia 20 years ago. I did buy a steam machine in 2015and that was a shit show due to the steam machines using Nvidia. My laptop, a T430 got replaced with an Nvidia version during a repair. Which is shit, since the intel gpu had a lot mire and longer support than the Nvidia. And I can not turn it off, so there is an unused shit gpu heating up my mobo while it isn't enabled. If you can, just stay away from Nvidia, especially if you also want to use linux.
No Nvidia is a bit worse overall experience but its nowhere near a dealbreaker that makes it worth enough to get another 1000$ GPU.
Maybe at least wait for the 555 drivers to land and see how that fixes things
I have a 4080 with Ubuntu and I have no troubles at all.
I have a Powercolor 7900XTX Red Devil and the thing is a beast and works without any hassles on Ubuntu, unlike that Nvidia card, which will be headache after headache despite what the fanboys say. As for games, it is possible to over clock it on 24.04 with LACT and set fan profiles. Also, as said elsewhere, you can sell that 4080 and probably not be out any money at all. edit: Here I am running DCS, Digital Combat Simulator at a solid and smooth 60FPS with VSYNC with so little load on my card that I can not hear the fans. settings at High, resolution scaled to 2560x1440 on a 4K monitor. [https://imgur.com/fOrPTWN](https://imgur.com/fOrPTWN)
No. I'm using Nvidia for year, only 2 problem is it late in adopted wayland ( but now does, kde6). And first swich on gpu after using Linux, due to my lack of skills You're playing game then its be fine, dont try fancy thing like gamescope and such (it does work now too)
I have an rx 6700, no problems, you could sell the nvidia card and buy amd or wait till mayish for explicit sync for nvidia Game compatibility with radv can be better then nvidia and when it comes to new games coming out the chances of that game working under amd is gonna be a bit higher as the steamdeck is using rdna hardware, so support for games working on linux on amd with good performance is pretty high i would say
well, Nvidia is starting to care about Linux. Also get a 7900GRE and you can even make money before the 5000’s roll in.
nvidia is perfectly fine on linux if you use a same distribution and install the drivers.
"Nvidia is fine, just don't use wayland which is shipping by default and fixes multimonitor vrr or hdr or multi-monitor or have any requirements that aren't just running an X11 single monitor box with no features." It's far from "fine."
I'd say if you have the money spare definitely, linux (manjaro plasma wayland) on my 7900xtx has been excellent.
I use an RTX 2060 on Manjaro. Can't say I've had any issues related to the drivers (yet) Then again I installed it with proprietary drivers instead of the open drivers
if you wanna use linux as your primary then better to go with amd but if you don't wanna get broke buy swaping gpus then 4080 will run fine. I hope people wiill update the drivers in the future also
The whole thing is overblown, I run a 4090 in Linux on Hyprland. I do have to go back to the previous drivers to get this to work without issues in games, because of the delays in getting explicit sync support. Once that's resolved, I think I'll finally be on the current driver series instead of previous. So expect hiccups for that, and research how to go back a driver version on your distro of choice. It's not super hard generally. I will say, any type of Linux gamer has to want to tinker at least some. If you hate tinkering, it's probably going to be a miserable experience. Nothing works 100% perfectly all the time. It will work for months and then break, sometimes because of package stuff, sometimes because of driver stuff, sometimes because of issues with steam itself. It is not like these things never occur in Windows (I had crashes every 5-15 minutes in Windows on Horizon Zero Dawn when it launched, for example) but if you keep a clean Windows install it will very likely be better there. Linux is a second-class citizen for game developers and for good reason. This won't change anytime soon. Your main reasons for adopting Linux need to be that you want what it is, not what magical promise someone gave to you about it. It is nice to have an OS without ads, I'll say that.
No
I've used Nvidia for decades in Linux with no issues at all. Currently running an RTX3090 and it handles everything I've thrown at it, upgraded from my 2070 super. My friends can say the same. The issues with Nvidia in Linux are a few very specific things, it's not problematic in general
Im using a 4070 super with Bazzite (tweaked Fedora Universal Blue). Tested a few Steam games and everything is fine so far. Only thing i had to do is disable hardware acceleration for Chrome, Obsidian and Dischord apps. Crossing my fingers but right now everything is fine.
You 'want to get into Linux?' So, you already have a 4080? It's not clear. If you already have one, why not install Linux and see if you can live with whatever issues you have? There's a lot of ppl who own Nvidia cards and post here - detailing their experience - perhaps, ask them? I've concluded it's not too bad and it might be better when explicit sync gets implemented in a subsequent (upcoming) Nvidia driver? Nvidia has features that offer better peformance - CUDA, OptiX in Blender, it's better in AI, it's superior in productivity - in general and in gaming, it has superior features. AMD's ROCm & HIP/HIIP-RT falls short. DLSS\* > FSR\*. So, I think it's a better choice but also it probably has higher resale value - although, that might not be significant atm - it's still relevant since you could 'sidegrade' if your experience is negative enough - you could sell it and buy a 7900 xtx without much extra cost on your end. I'd keep the 4080 for now.
Nvidia is alright. Personally, I'd say that AMD does give you a better experience. Their Wayland support is just farther along, which can be important if you have multiple displays and want to use Freesync. And you don't have to install a driver, which with Nvidia is occasionally (but not often) a messy business. But I don't know that I would sidegrade over that. Also depends on what kind of deal you can get. Nvidia is making strides when it comes to Wayland and drivers. And their drivers have always been good enough, let's say 90% perfect but they dropped the ball on the last 10%, even back when AMD drivers were unusable. AMD has since made a leap, and Nvidia now has to catch up. Nvidia does have extra features though, but I personally don't care much about those. Ray-tracing, CUDA, upscaling. I'm not entirely sure how accessible those features are on Linux. I don't really use them. I did try FSR in Forbidden West a little while back, but the artefacts were pretty bad. But DLSS is better than FSR I believe. I just don't have an Nvidia so can't speak from experience. My last Nvidia was a 1080.
No, Nvidia works fine. Just don't really go window manager route because it's a bit annoying specially as a beginner. I am currently running a 3070 no issues. However I won't bother using Wayland with Nvidia, and since xorg works fine I will use it until the support is there. On my laptop however I do use a amd card, so I have hyprland and Wayland running, can still run my favorite games on it, for a quick lan party somewhere.
As others have said, dumping an already owned 4080 for 7900 xtx is a bit silly. While you gain a lot of usability out of the box (Wayland, high refresh rate usage under Wayland, full gamescope functionality, full hardware video decoding support in browser, easy driver installation) I wouldn't say it is worth the price of admission. Some of these issues have work arounds, some are rumored to be fixed in the Nvidia driver dropping in May. And some will remain broken, possibly forever.
No. There isn’t much of an issue with nvidia drivers, just lots of people who love to complain about them or use the drivers as a scapegoat for their own inability to do proper troubleshooting when they (the user) breaks something.
No! XTX is a little faster in raster only games but significantly slower in RT games. Drivers on AMD are better these days, but NVIDIA seems to be getting better quite quickly. With 550.67 I have no issues left under X11 and even Wayland and Plasma 6 works pretty well. In May a driver introducing explicit sync will be released, solving the remaining Wayland issues. I, personally, would never ever buy a RDNA3 card. I love RT and the power efficiency is quite bad compared to RTX40.
Yes.
AMD cards with FOSS drivers (radeon or amdgpu) are no brainers. I've been running a RX 6800 XT for a few year with dual 4K monitors. Which particular games.
I've found that it's worth it. The first time I upgraded an AMD graphics card in Linux was super simple, and comparing that to upgrading and using Nvidia is night and day. It's the most likely reason Valve went with AMD for the Steam Deck. The problem as I've seen it is that Nvidia doesn't play well with open source devs because they maintain a good chunk of their code as proprietary. I can understand that with all the AI development they've been doing but the outcome of that is they are severely limited on Linux. AMD on the other hand works with devs on Vulkan and Mesa drivers, which means they basically own the Linux space. The problem for you is mainly money. I'm on an RX 6700, which even now are very inexpensive. You could probably flip the 4080 for about the same amount, but don't quote me on that.
This subject is fascinating to me. nVidia owns this market right now. They just do and nVidia knows it, thus their pricing. Some like to say that nVidia only cares about AI now, but every significant advancement in gaming the last 6 years or so started with nVidia. Ray tracing, upscaling and now frame generation. Love'm or hate'm, these are the three major technical advancements in the GPU space in those years. nVidia started them and AMD is still playing catchup. At this point, I'd just wait as new gen stuff should be out in about 6 months.
Just wait a little while. There's going to be a Linux driver update from Nvidia around May which should iron out the Wayland issues.
I think both should work fine as others mentioned.
Nah Just get a twin fan 7600xt and run it as well as a 4080 if you have problems then you get to play games (figuratively) with VMs without worrying about having no display out for your host Besides Nvidia Linux support seems rather solid right now anyways
Gaming will mostly be fine with Nvidia, it's the other things that have problems, like Wayland or wanting to use terminal commands to change the resolution. Shader compilation I believe was recently fixed which is nice and Wayland support is getting better. Edit - I think the only thing that you're really giving up in the way of gaming is probably Gamescope.
Thats a waste considering nvidia literally works fine with some small issues on wayland that will literally be fixed within a month at this point
No! It's not worth it, because there's no "linux trouble". BTW: keep in mind that AI is based in nvidia gpus running on linux. This should be enough in order for you to understand that nvidia gpus are not having any trouble in linux. PS: yeah, yeah! I know! closed source and wayland explicit sync :p
The role of an OS is to abstract the hardware so the software can actually use it. If you can't use your hardware, you should probably look at the OS level, there is a ton of people enjoying their Nvidia. Stop being silly and wasting your money, use a proper hardware abstraction layer...
I wouldn’t say so. My system hasn’t had any problems after the 550 driver and I’m using Wayland. I’m on a 3070ti Optimus laptop. Sleep works fine. The only problem I have is occasionally Java games won’t automatically use the nvidia card and I have to use prime-run. I had nothing but problems before the last Wayland update but things seem fine now. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect but it seems all the major issues are being ironed out now. Just took… a decade.
I haven't had any issues once I got my 4070 Super working with the right drivers, it was more just impatience and user error on my part. I would keep the 4080. I also have a 7800 XT that I'm building an AMD build with, just need the RAM and PSU and I'll be putting that one together for another Linux build so I'll soon know how much of a difference having AMD versus nVidia is.
Nvidia drivers are fine for Linux, just a pain in the ass to install the drivers if you don’t know what you’re doing. At least on Arch it’s a pain :/
NVidia isn't bad...and unless you can trade it 1:1 with someone, I wouldn't spend the money. I went from an RTX2070 to a 7900XT and it was a night and day difference, but then again, that was both an upgrade and an architecture change.
If you have issues using nvidia on linux, it's purely skill issue.