NVIDIA vs AMD

[Thalhammer]

Hello,

Now that gpu prices are coming down a bit I am looking for a upgrade for my 2013 AMD R9 270.

I am looking for something in the 400-500€ range that can drive 3 monitors at 1080p (and ideally game across them).

I had nvidia in the very past and I always had issues with it on linux.

My last two gpus where both AMD and I am really pleased with the support.

My card is still getting the latest vulkan support despite being 9 years old and works flawless on linux.

I think the performance I need is around the RTX3060 (I dont play the latest tripple AAA since I am a cheap ass and wait till they are on sale).

AMD's equivalent locks to be the rx6600xt, which is about the same perf for a similar price.

NVIDIA however seemsto have better support for hardware video encoding/decoding and most importantly has dedicated raytracing hardware, something I wanted to experiment in game dev for a while now.

AMD on the other hand seems to crush NVIDIA on anything pure compute, which (with more and more games using compute for all kind of stuff) might get more important.

NVIDIA also has 12 instead of AMD's 8GB of memory, something which has been proven to be the biggest bottleneck for my current card (it only has 2).

So overall the NVIDIA card sounds like the obvious choice, however all of that is irrelevant if driver support is still as crappy as it used to be.

Anyone have experience with (recent) nvidia on linux ?

What about vulkan support for nvidia (someone mentioned that they dont support it as well as AMD)?

Sincerely,
Thalhammer

PS: I am new to this forum so please forgive any errors in making the post.

[TorC]

nVidia has superior graphics.  raytracing alone makes that statement true.  

Both manufactureres have had driver-related prolems of late.  nVidia does not stand alone in that regard.

 

nVidia has been a PITA for drivers as long as I can remember.  the question is . . . is it worth it?

[Valso]

I'm using nvidia since 2015 and I don't see much difference in drivers between linux and windows. Both work just fine and both don't require any additional actions to make them work the way you want. If anything, the linux driver has some functions that the Windows driver doesn't have - the option to set display of FPS per application. Or the dual display setup which in linux is a child's play whereas on Windows often that's a mission impossible and requires a lot of work to make it work.

From 2006 until 2014 I was using AMD videocards and for the most part of that time it was fine. But the R# and RX series were huge headaches because of the untested drivers - constant driver crashes (in Windows; I moved to Linux in 2015), constant artifacts, not to mention I didn't have to turn on my air conditioner in the winter because the videocards were so hot that they were heating up my entire room . 65 Celsius when idle, 90+ when gaming. These were the temperatures of R9... 270, I think. I can't remember right now the exact number of the model. After that came RX 370 which had the same problems and temperatures. Eventually the RX died and I had it enough. Since it was still in warranty, I payed additional $30 and got my first nvidia - 1050 Ti back then. All the problems disappeared and that's why 7th year in a row I'm with nvidia and have changed the videocard only once. Changed it not because of problems but because the 1050 Ti didn't perform well with the games I wanted to play. Nowadays it sits in its package in the wardrobe gathering dust but it still works perfectly, so I'm keeping it as a backup hardware.

For comparison - in these 9 or 10 years with AMD, I changed the videocard 11 times (starting with my first videocard on my first computer): 9550, HD series: 4450, 5450, 6660, 6670, 6770, 7770, 7870, 7990 (7870 and 7990 were second hand because they were too expensive as new), R9 270, RX 370. From all these only 6660, 6670 and 6770 performed perfectly and worked the longest without a single problem.

I'm far from the desire to spark the old nvidia-vs-amd war but based on my own experience nvidia is the better choice. Consider this: from 2006 until 2014 I changed the videocard 11 times (AMD). From 2015 until 2022 I changed the videocard only ONCE and only for an upgrade (NVIDIA). You do the math which is better.

[Thalhammer]

13 hours ago, Valso said:

I'm far from the desire to spark the old nvidia-vs-amd war but based on my own experience nvidia is the better choice. Consider this: from 2006 until 2014 I changed the videocard 11 times (AMD). From 2015 until 2022 I changed the videocard only ONCE and only for an upgrade (NVIDIA). You do the math which is better.

I am in no way saying your experience is wrong, but mine has pretty much been the exact opposite.
I had one NVIDIA which was a single big headache under linux (crappy to get working, artifacts, broken driver every 2 or so updates) and this one died after a while (hardware failure). I since had two AMDs HD6770 and the R9 270 I am replacing now and both still work fine and were a breeze to setup. I just plugged them in and they worked. All I had to do was install vulkan support when that became a thing and now I am running vulkan 1.2 on a 9 year old gpu. Not to mention that amd doesn't artifically restrict the hardware from working in VMs. Software wise AMD would be the clear win, but NVIDIA has a pretty big price/performance benefit (at least at my pricepoint), which feels weird given that amd used to be the "cheap" option. NVIDIA seems to be a bit slow driver wise (looking at vulkandb, the rx6600xt supports vulkan 1.3 and the 3060 only vulkan 1.2). I am not sure if the hardware rt cores are worth the hassle since both amd and nvidias cards can do raytracing and both dont seem to be capable of doing it at playable framerates.

[SomethingPenguin]

AMD is the way to go imo with one exception. Having the drivers included in the kernel is a double edged sword. If you just got a brand new recently-released card and your distro of choice doesn't have a kernel that supports it yet... you're gonna have a bad time.  If the card has been out for at least one or two distro release cycles you're probably going to have a great experience.

 

Many people will say "oh just update the kernel manually", yeah sometimes that works fine, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes there are other packages that you need to run the card well/take advantage of that new kernel that are held behind on your distro waiting for the next release. So just keep that in mind. 

~7 month old AMD card > Nvidia card > Brand new AMD card

 

[10leej]

On 4/28/2022 at 1:15 AM, Valso said:

Consider this: from 2006 until 2014 I changed the videocard 11 times (AMD). From 2015 until 2022 I changed the videocard only ONCE and only for an upgrade (NVIDIA). You do the math which is better.

2006 to 2014 barely any custom PC would last two years

 

16 hours ago, SomethingPenguin said:

If the card has been out for at least one or two distro release cycles you're probably going to have a great experience.

Most distro have backport kernels. Even ubuntu 18.04 can have a modern kernel as I believe 5.15 is in backports. Then there are PPA's available for 16.04 if you really wanna go old.

Really though you just want to watch kernel releases, not distro releases. Most often GPU support for future generations are included into mainline kernels well ahead of release (we had radeon 6xxx series as far back as 5.6) while the driver may not be complete. So just because you bought a GPU that released yesterday, doesn't mean you HAVE to install something like Archlinux to have it work. Whats import, is to just simply do your research (literally google "linux support rtx 3090" and your answer is usually provided within the fiorst 3 results)