I would say it doesn’t do anything more or better than a polaris card but you don’t get the benefit of open drivers. Am I wrong on that?
IMO open drivers vs nvenc for ffmpeg, or audio, or just as a coprocessor. I’d rather have a 970 than a 580. Plus nvenc is more performant than vaapi, last I knew.
OK, so for streaming / transcoding you would prefer it. That’s fair. CUDA is also a thing that is nvidia exclusive, yeah. If those features are important, no AMD card will cut it.
I might be wrong here but to me it reads like the op just wants to use desktop programs, watch videos and have a solid card for pixel dense displays with the minimum amount of hoops to jump through.
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Eh. I’m just thinking of expandability and cost. Times are tough atm and all. Just thinking utility is all.
AMD does have hardware based encoding as well, not really as good as Nvidia but certainly no slouch either. So it really boils down to CUDA.
I think the scientific community are already feeling the pain from that specific vendor lock-in. But I digress.
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A quick look at ebay suggests that GTX970s are just too expensive compared to a used RX570 that is likely newer (production year wise, architecture is just about a year difference) and more efficient.
To be fair Maxwell nvenc also wasn’t amazing as far as I heard. For streaming I would either go newer nvidia or software encode. And with a 3900X or better CPU that would be more than doable.
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Maybe… but the performance and cost on that, how does it compare to say a 570?
I don’t really think its in a different performance class, and the driver support isn’t as good right now. Given the drivers are open, and Polaris is still included in a bunch of current hardware, I don’t see the support time-frame being an issue.
As to Nvidia, if you need CUDA or whatever, sure. But as above, sounds like the OP just wants basic output to multiple monitors at decent res, etc. For that an RX5xx or even 4xx is just brain out simple and trouble-free. Install any mainstream linux distro (and probably even non-mainstream so long as they include a 3yo to recent kernel) from the past 3 years and it “just works”.
Card is what… 5 years old now? Non-open drivers - it was a decent choice 5 years ago, but today you’re looking at potential hardware failure and no guarantee of long term driver support.
If you currently have one, great - but I wouldn’t suggest putting 5 year old hardware in a brand new build myself.
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Yes, everything you say is true right now. I suspect the RX 5x0 line will be discontinued once big Navi comes out, which is within the next six months. At the same time, it is the better purchase for now.
The RX 5x00 line will be supported for quite a while longer after Polaris, seeing as it will be on Navi. With any luck Navi will age really well with 1.0 cards lasting ten years or even more, but as you say, it is betting on the future.
I think mainstream support for Polaris will fizzle out after 3 to 4 years or so once discontinued. So the 5500 XT only makes sense if you want something that lasts 5+ years.
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Even when taking support duration into consideration… you can buy a solid 570 brand new for around 100,- bucks less than any Navi card. Ride that one for a while, get a new card when you have to. Financially it doesn’t matter and you don’t have to gamble on support getting better.
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Also with open drivers - “mainstream support” doesn’t really matter, unless you’re interested in high end gaming.
The driver is in-kernel, it will be maintained (as in supported/functional/included) for decades. It just might not get the level of performance improvements…
For windows, I’d totally agree and be all over Navi, but linux, no gaming… Polaris just makes sense 
somewhat on topic, every 2-3 years I jump onto Linux desktop bandwagon and give up mainly because bad GPU support.
would like to have:
- multidpi + fractional dpi support (drag apps from one monitor to another and have them change dpi)
- separate colour profile support (per display ICC profiles)
- HDR 10bit support (rec.2020 colorspace output)
All at the same time.
All these have been possible on macs for a number of years, not so much on Windows (hdr and sdr->hdr calibration is a mess there).
How is amd/polaris doing these days?
How is Nvidia doing (last time I tried wayland was a no go on nvidia - prerequisite for multidpi)?
Scaling and colour profiles are not GPU bound but desktop environment features. I know 20.04 has fractional scaling but if you require those features stay on mac.
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You can get new, solid 570 cards for $80 or $60 USD?
NewEgg and Microcenter have 5500 XTs for $179.99 [actually $159.99 after mail-in rebate, and including a decent game bundle]…
FWIW, I have an MSI 5500 XT in a small mATX case running PopOS! 20.04 with no issues… [that I paid $180 for a few months ago].
I have seen the Sapphire ITX RX570 on sale for 99,- Euros. I have not seen a Navi card for less than 190,- here in Germany.
A friend did a swap with me and I obtained an HD6670. This card requires no PCIe 12v power cable, it draws it’s power from the slot. It has DVI (support for VGA), HDMI and DP outputs. With 1GB RAM it can drive decent sized displays. I’ve used it with Proxmox GPU passthrough and it automatically installs drivers on Windows 10 and Linux Mint. It’s sufficient for lightweight games. They are just £25 on ebay.
NVidia cards are fine if that’s what you’ve got but given the choice it’s better to go for AMD for Linux. AMD is doing much more work in this area.
even though you don’t need gaming, the vega 56 is pretty good for a medium budget and also has the bonus of allowing some 3d rendering for blender and other tasks.
It’s open source and plug and play in every distro I’ve tested, also great for my triple monitor setup.
It’s not so great for NN / ML but if you’re not doing that it’s probably good enough
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DISCLAMER: in following post, word performance is not gaming performance.
- Linux Mint 19.3 with 5.4.0-67-generic kernel.
- AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX
- 16 GB RAM at 3000 Mhz
- Nvidia geforce GT 1030 / Nvidia geforce GT 710
- 2560x1440 resolution
- I do not play games
I had GT 710 and had serious performance issues on 2560x1440 monitor. I had a mouse lag while moving mouse and clicking was imprecise and unreliable. I felt like I am using 15+ years Celeron. It was almost unusable for every day task and completely unusable for professional work. When watching full screen 1440p YT videos, psensors showed utilization over 90%. On MS Windows, GT 710 works like a charm.
I switched to faster GT 1030 and performance issues disappear. In NVIDIA X Server settings applet I checked “Force Full Composition Pipeline” option and screen tearing in firefox and youtube videos seems to disappear.
The main issue I have with GT 1030 is when I resume system from suspended state. When resumed from suspended state, sometimes I have following issues:
-some artifacts are displayed
-desktop background image is broken
-no desktop icons
-no response on desktop click
-gui element are missing
-cant do video editing using Shotcut or similar software
-requires reboot
TL;DR GT 1030 works fine on Linux but I can’t suspend system and have to shutdown or reboot every day.
Here is how system behave after resume (recorder with smartphone):
YOUTUBE: watch?v=LbG3Qnfpowc
EDIT: I found GT 710 recording on youtube and you can watch it here:
YOUTUBE: watch?v=boS13aDoP9c
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