Hello everybody, recently I had both of my 7870's die in my main workstation. I dual booted windows and Linux. I primarily gamed on windows do to poor performance with AMD drivers, including Crossfire on Linux. Now I'd prefer to do most of my gaming on Linux.
Budget: $600-$700
No preference in video card vendor or manufacturer.
I use Arch Linux and Windows 10 in my dual boot.
I also have looked into a Nvidia 980 TI as a option.
Update! I bought dual 390X's from my local Best Buy on sale!
In my opinion an nvidia card with the binary drivers is usually best for linux gaming. Everytime I have tried AMD it has been hit and miss, some games perform well and others suck.
The release of kernel 4.2 and newer binary and open source AMD drivers may have changed that for the 390 series but it sounds like the Fury still isn't performing well - take a look on the Phronix website.
I have a 250X and it performs well. I imagin you could do any of the 200 series and have the same effect. On that, you could get a 380 and it would serve you well. I have seen a lot of nice things about it and it would be worth looking at. With that kind of budget though I would look at some dual GPU cards and see their performance.
I keep hearing Arch prefers nVidia. GTX 980 or a used Titan Black, something in that realm.
ATM the issues with AMD is with Fury cards, since they are brand new architecture and everything... Even 390X have mature enough drivers...
Fury / fury X support will come with linux 4.3 and 4.4. That being said 980 / 980ti performs well under Linux, as well as r9 300 series
I'm using 980tis in sli & have been surprised at how well they run. I don't get the FPS that I do in windows, but the stability is better in Linux.
I really want to recommend the amd cards, but I've had way better luck with nvidia. My 980ti is as fast or faster than it is in windows.
I am going to side on the AMD side only because the nvidia drivers have always been a pain in my ass. This could also be hardware issues on my end so take my advice with a grain of salt.
I will admit though, a 250X works pretty great for me (it's what I could afford).
Nvidia open source drivers suck. I think with a rolling release you'd have to constantly update them manually for every kernel release.
I would take @FaunCB's advice and get a 380 or a 200 series card. I know the 280X works flawlessly.
Are you using proprietary or open source drivers? Just curious. I've never heard this before if it is in fact the latter (which would be amazing).
I have seen people use 380's for stuff like wine gaming flawlessly (one of my friends plays League competitively and he runs linux and uses League in wine,). Good area to look.
I have heard this, but I've heard from the same source that they are still getting more performance out of a 780 Ti than they did with a 290X.
Yeah, it's a solid card. It's based off of the 285 which uses GCN 1.2 allowing AMDGPU to be FULLY utilized unlike previous architectures.
My 250X is a recent refresh on the chips. Latest GCN I think and it works pretty well for me :3
I just have wierd issues that I think stem form the motherboard.
Interesting. All I had to test was a 650 Ti a year or so ago. It could hardly handle L4D2. They may have improved by now though. I know 900 series cards (according to Phronix) hardly even work on the FOSS driver so if they were to go Nvidia a 780 Ti would be the best route
Could be. I am not a linux user, and as such I wouldn't personally know. A number of friends who do use linux are using nVidia cards for various reasons, the most common being the consistent performance across driver updates. If I had a GTX 660 Ti or something similar I could get into Arch and test it against the 7870 XT with various drivers.
So according to this, he allready has made his decision