So, I'm planning to get a new graphics card soon and I'm probably going to go the highend route so I'm stuck between either a Fury/Fury X or a 980 Ti. However I am stuck to the point where the Linux drivers are probably going to make a big difference in my decision so I was wondering which manufacturer actually makes the better drivers for Linux and is the difference even very big?
P.S.: I am still a bit of a Linux noob so please be patient with me
With your AMD choice there is one problem. AMD have not yet released the drivers. AMD decided on a slightly new driver structure for Linux which allows for both open and closed drivers to work much more nicely with Linux.
Right now the open drivers are very good but dont work with all games quite well and miss a few features. the closed drivers are also very good but suffer the same problem as the nvidia drivers, they kinda suck when it comes to integration with the kernel. with the new AMDGPU drivers that is fixed and one side effect means you should be able to seamlessly swap between open and closed drivers due to the new kernel component, the closed drivers should also have much better integration.
The AMDGPU drivers are set for Linux 4.2, the closed driver component for the new cards will likely not be out by the time 4.2 is out (ive no idea).
What I would suggest it you wait a little bit and see what happens once 4.2 is out and the new AMD drivers are out.
thats my thought.
IIRC Amd linux support is awful and Nvidias isn't much much better but is better.
As of March of 2015 which was the last time i saw a head to head comparison of the drivers, Nvidia out preformed by a significant margin across the board. However, while Nvidia distributed the best drivers in terms of performance, AMD's Drivers were easier to Troubleshoot, install and update, thus for people with limited understanding of linux had a much more user friendly experience.
Also what exactly is the difference between the open source and the proprietary drivers in terms of performance and usability?
I've not done a proper comparison.
My experience has been that the open drivers work very well for many games. I use them for games like civ5, uropa universals , crusader kings, cities skylines, planetary anhiliation and a bunch of others
It works very well for all of them and I don't notice the performance difference with the exception of PA which has a little bug with the mouse (fixabke) and I think has a little lower performance when there's a lot on the screen tho I'd need to test that more.
For non gaming the open drivers are a no brainer. They work really well on the desktop.
For applications using opencl your only choice is the closed drivers as the open drivers don't have opencl yet.
The open drivers work better overall in my opinion especially if your on newer technology with the latest kernel and xorg and the closed drivers are somtimes incompatible with new updates until and updated driver is released.
With amdgpu the talk is that switching between drivers should be very simple. The closed drivers will also be integrated better giving a lot of the benefits the open drivers have to the closed drivers (somthing nviida also can't do)
Hope that's useful. When the new driver stack is out I'm hoping someone does a good performance comparison.
Anyone know if the 390x will work currently on linux or is this going to be a nightmare when I try it this weekend?
Long story short. Both Company's drivers suck.
The closed source component and the AMD kernel drivers should be all one in the same.
Furthermore, it should all be out for kernel 4.2. Even the RC kernels from the git hub page already support a select few AMD cards for testing.
Is the 390x a sea island card? (if so itll work fine)
With AMDGPU the kernel component is completely open source now and so separate from the binary driver. It plugs in either userspace binary blob from with the non-free features or the open mesa drivers.
As of right now nVidia has objectively better performing drivers for gaming. That being said they go out of their way to make it really hard for the open source devs who have to write nVidia drivers via reverse engineering. AMD on the other hand is making their drivers even more open then they were before but it's unknown when we'll see some gains in gaming to close the sometimes massive gap. There are also some weird fixes for performance issues for some games like CSGO for example where renaming the csgo_linux binary to hl2_linux can yield large performance gains.
Sources:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-csgo-workaround&num=1
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=catalyst-155-linux&num=2
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdnv-phoronix-11&num=2