I have this question. I see people, with some frequency, sugar coating the Nvidia GPU marriage with Linux. I get that if you already have a Nvidia GPU or you need CUDA or work with AI and want to use Linux that is possible. Nevertheless, this still a very questionable relationship.
Shouldn’t we be raising awareness about in case one plan to game titles that uses DX12? I mean 15% to 30% performance loss using Nvidia compared to Windows, over 5% to 15% and some times same performance or better using AMD isn’t something to be alerting others?
I know we wanna get more people on Linux, and NVIDIA’s getting better, but don’t we need some real talk about this? Or is there some secret plan to scare people away from Linux that I missed?
Am I misinformed? Is there some strong reason to buy a Nvidia GPU if your focus is gaming in Linux?
yes, HDMI 2.1. if you use a tv as a monitor, you won’t get 4k120 with amd cards on linux because hdmi forum is assholes
That is a fair reason and a good remind actually. Thanks!
CUDA acceleration.
I think the answer is if you are shooting for the high-end. AMD is better cost / performance but NVIDIA is still unchallenged for absolute performance if budget is not a consideration.
And if you need CUDA…
I agree with that, because there is no offering from AMD to compete with the absolute performance.
I’d say in general, the advantages of Nvidia cards are fairly niche even on windows. Like, multi frame generation (fake frames) and upscaling are kind of questionable in terms of value add most of the time, and most people probably aren’t going to be doing any ML stuff on their computer.
AMD in general offers better performance for the money, and that’s doubly so with Nvidia’s lackluster Linux support. AMD has put the work in to get their hardware running well on Linux, both in terms of work from their own team and being collaborative with the open source community.
I can see why some people would choose Nvidia cards, but I think, even on windows, a lot of people who buy them probably would have been better off with AMD. And outside of some fringe edge cases, there is no good reason to choose them when building or buying a computer you intend to mainly run Linux on.
Even though I hate Nvidia, they have a couple of advantages:
- CUDA
- Productivity
- Their cards retain higher resale values
So if you need this card for productivity and not only gaming, Nvidia is probably better, if you buy second hand or strictly for gaming, AMD is better.
It depends on the type of productivity TBH. Like, sure some productivity use cases need CUDA, but a lot of productivity use cases are just using the cards as graphics cards. The places where you need CUDA are real, but not ubiquitous.
And “this is my personal computer I play games on, but also the computer I do work on, and that work needs CUDA specifically” is very much an edge case.
As far as I am aware they are also better at video encoding and if you want to use Blender or similar software, yes, it is niche, but a credible consideration. As always, it really depends on the use case.
From just hardware perspective, Nvidia cards are more energy efficient.
That’s not quite true. AMD cards just get clocked higher from the factory. So when a 9070xt beats a 5070 by an average of 17%, you can easily cap the power limit to match the performance. That’s with more VRAM which of course increases the power requirements
The prices don’t quite match up, though since it’s between the 5070 and the ti (although in the US it’s often more expensive for some reason)
The problem is that AMD is selling the chips to OEMs for a price that’s too high to enable to sell at MSRP while giving a discount for small batches of MSRP models. It becomes a lottery where the quickest people can get $600 models refreshing ever rarer restocks.
One of the reasons is… tariffs, but I’m not sure how Nvidia got the prices down on its models
While measuring power efficiency is not an easy task, I doubt that AMD is better. Here is an older article https://www.tomshardware.com/news/geforce-rtx-4070-vs-radeon-rx-6950-xt-which-gpu-is-better But you are right, things seem changing https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/incredibly-efficient-amd-rx-9070-gpu-review-benchmarks-vs-9070-xt-rtx-5070 Hopefully AMD improves on efficiency in future.
The 9070xt is a very fine exception for efficiency really. I was able to cap mine at 230watt with a minor underclock and it barely lost 5% perf compared to stock.
Even base models were clocked way too high, probably to help it ensure vfm victory over NVIDIA midrange in the market when reviewers were looking at it.
I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.
Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.
Yep, that’d be me. That said if I were to buy a new GPU today (well, tomorrow, waiting on Valve announcement for its next HMD) I might still get an NVIDIA because even though I’m convinced 99% of LLM/GenAI is pure hype, if 1% might be useful, might be built ethically and might run on my hardware, I’d be annoyed if it wouldn’t because ROCm is just a tech demo but is too far performance wise. That’d say the percentage is so ridiculously low I’d probably pick the card which treats the open ecosystem best.
Ollama works just fine for me with an AMD GPU.
I use local ai for speech/object recognition from my video security system and control over my HomeAssistant and media services. These services are isolated from the Internet for security reasons, that wouldn’t be possible if they required OpenAI to function.
ChatGPT and Sora are just tech toys, but neural networks and machine learning are incredibly useful components. You would be well served by staying current on the technology as it develops.
From what I’ve heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.
Honestly, though, I’m in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only “AI” thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it’s sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape’s results aren’t always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through “cartoon mode” upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.
Of course, I don’t have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it’s a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.
That is correct in my case, startedwith linux earlier this year. Will be switching to AMD for the next upgrade.
I did this.
From:
Intel i7 14700K + 3080 TI
To:
Ryzen 7700X + RX 7900 XTX.
The difference on Wayland is very big.
AMD will have superior support and better power management out of the box hands down.
Nvidia may have a minor performance improvement in some areas depending on the card, but not in a way you would care if you aren’t obsessed with the technical specifics of the graphics on AAA games.
I’ve been on Linux as a dev and daily driver for 20 years, and Nvidia drivers are just problematic unless you know exactly how to fix them when there are issues. That’s an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem. Cuda on AMD is also a thing if you want to go that route.
The choice is yours.
You’re misinformed, mostly.
NVIDIA had driver issues, incompatibility with gamescope (which was required for HDR) and a few instances of bugs, in WINE/proton, that caused performance problems in specific games/configurations.
Now, the driver issues for the mainline cards (the most common ones on Steam’s hardware survey) are about the same frequency as AMD hardware and we use Wayland’s native HDR, so gamescope isn’t a concern.
I’ve been using NVIDIA on Linux for 2 years now and I have never seen anything like a 30% performance reduction on any game, and I can also run local AI with acceleration.
As long as you’re using current hardware then you’re fine. If your graphics card was released 2 days ago, or is from the ‘00s then you may experience issues but otherwise NVIDIA cards work just fine.
deleted by creator
I have freezes on the latest Nvidia drivers as recently as yesterday on wine. Also Wayland wine is not ready, doesn’t even full screen properly
Osu! linux version is ten times slower than wine using the same graphics back end. Yes, I get over 1000 fps on wine and only 100 natively. It would be fine if it didn’t get choppy and drop lower during the busiest part of the game.
Just because it works for you doesn’t mean it doesn’t have issues
Conversely, just because it doesn’t work for you that doesn’t mean that there are issues. I use Wayland Wine for everything, it works fine for me and even eliminates hitching caused by XWayland.
If you’re using a graphics card driver that’s newer than the version of wine then you could have problems, but this is true if you’re using AMD, NVIDIA or Intel.
Comparing osu native vs wine has nothing to do with NVIDIA or AMD hardware.
So are you saying that those are false claims?
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207
Sorry the Reddit links: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nr4tva/does_the_nvidia_dx12_bug_20ish_performance_loss/
As you can see people report this from 2 years ago and also 14 days ago.
There isn’t a global 30% performance loss. There are specific games/configurations that have performance issues and bugs, but it isn’t all games.
For example, there is a current bug, if you’re using some features in VKD3D(like ray tracing) which NVIDIA has identified and is creating a fix. The problem isn’t Linux specific, if you use VKD3D on Windows it also has this problem.
The second Reddit link is a user confusing a Baldur’s Gate 3 bug, where vulkan was implemented in a buggy way, with a performance problem.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux. The social media meme “NVIDIA sucks on Linux” is based on old issues when NVIDIA cards had bugs that broadly affected games and other software to the point where it required a lot of effort (like patching your own software using git).
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues. The strongest reason to use NVIDIA over AMD would be if you used CUDA to run local AI. AMD doesn’t work with CUDA and the projects that fix this are in the alpha stages.
Gaming-wise, unless you play video games by staring at MangoHUD and comparing your historical frame-time graphs across multiple OSs, it works just fine.
There isn’t a global 30% performance loss. There are specific games/configurations that have performance issues and bugs, but it isn’t all games.
That was not what I said. I don’t recall saying that there is a global 30% performance loss. I’m sorry if I gave margin for that interpretation.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux.
This one in particular seem to be taking some time for Nvidia to fix.
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues.
I don’t think I was implying that it doesn’t work. My point is that for certain games that relies on certain technologies the Nvidia drivers are not optimized to reach Windows level or even AMD level on Linux for equivalents cards. It may worth reviewing the Nvidia forum link that I posted first.
I still give the benefit of the doubt that I may be missing something and need to learn better something although I’m not following your reasoning completely.
Finally, I just want to also point that I don’t have strings attached to any GPU maker. I wish we had more options but it sounds that if we want something reasonable with good open source driver support for many different types of combinations of games, hardware and technology, AMD seems our only choice in Linux given this incidental bad performance present on DX12 combined with Nvidia GPUs on Linux.
it is better to go with AMD because AMD drivers are built into the iso and less headache for gaming
