So I have heard that there’s a significant performance hit when playing games on Linux primarily due to poorly optimized GPU drivers.
That being said I am wondering whether nvidia or AMD suffers from a bigger performance hit and thus has worse drivers for Linux.
Any ideas?
The above is not entirely true. Most of that hit comes from bad ports or non-native ports which use a translation layer to go from DirectX to OGL.
In general, you will get the best performance with team green on the unix-like systems. However, you have to jump through at least one hoop to get up and running on team green and when the kernel gets updated.
While team red does not perform as strongly as NV, the differences are negligible in most cases and the performance is high enough where you will not notice a difference. The other thing is that the AMD drivers are open sourced an built into the Linux kernel. When you update the kernel, you update the drivers. They are pretty much in a “it just works” state.
If you dual boot between GNU/Linux and Windows, pick the card that you will see most benefit in both OSes.
Opensource AMD works the best OOB
Nvidia is still faster. Its pretty much that simple except for OpenCL loads… whats your application on linux
If you want to support go all AMD
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The basic gist of it is nvidia takes less of a performance hit than amd on linux but this means very little to most people. The thing you should ask yourself is, what refresh is your monitor actually running at and what is an acceptable framerate for you?
If your answer is 60hz, and the card you’ve chosen to get is barely able to manage 60 fps in windows, well, then… I think you get where I’m going with this.
If you buy a 2070/vega 64 and then turn around and play minecraft on it, who cares how crappy the driver may or may not be?
IMO, if you’re not running 1440 144hz, worrying about driver efficiency is really just like asking what corvette gets the best gas mileage. You’re gaming on linux so AAA titles arent likely to run, at least not day one.
basically this ^^
the problem isnt really drivers, its non native games. If you really want max performance, linux isnt going to deliver that for you. If you’re ok with decent performance and play older titles, linux does just fine.
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Look at protondb - tons of triple AAA titles now run on Linux almost from day one. And there’s also plenty of triple AAA titles with ports that I want to explore etc.
But fundamentally I really want to support the brand that cares more about linux above anything else.
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proton is neat but its a case of it either works great or doesnt work at all. I dont game on linux because it doesnt make sense for a lot of games.
Then get an AMD card, its a no brainer.
It really depends.
Nvidia with proprietary drivers gives you the best performance, but as Linus Torvalds said: “Nvidia, Fuck you.”
AMD is officially open-source, and their drivers are pretty good but still have some issues.
Nvidia with the reverse-engineered open source drivers is a bad time.
Yeah, AMD is the correct choice for you.
AMD is the pretty obvious choice… Proton is still kind of hit or miss by the way
Yeah, definitely don’t rely on proton.
Well I have a list of games that I want to play and according to user reviews the all seem to run at the gold/platinum level with proton. Plus there are plenty of native-linux games that I also want to play etc. I think I will go for the AMD card.
Lisa Su loves gamers and she loves you so go get that navi buddy.
[leather jacket intensifies]
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Navis pretty good…
You can always see if you can get a second hand not mined on Vega II as well… if thats the route you want to go. I buy a lot of parts second hand. Have had good luck so far beating retail altogether
Any point in doing crossfire for 4K? Is this still a thing?
I mean ehhh? Ive gone away from dual GPU setups myself… They are a pain and a bigger single GPU is usually better. given its linux just dont try
I think it still technically exists but its not worth. most games dont scale very well with it. Better off just buying the bigger beefier card.
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I dont think crossfire ever worked well for Linux. I wouldn’t trust it.
Theoretically it worked, but the AMD opensource devs did not see a big enough market to finish it. The plumbing is there though.
With VULKAN multi GPU support being superior in every way according to driver devs and developers, that may be a path forward.
Honestly, you are still better with one single GPU to rule them all. Newest card that you can get with grade A open source support is Vega 64 and RX 580. The 590 needs kernel 5.0. I believe VII also needs that kernel but graphics wise, it is under performing. Radeon 5700 is still baking in 5.2 i believe so you do not want to go with that card yet.
I have a 1070 (for a long time now). Never had to jump threw a hoop and kernels are CONSTANTLY updating on Fedora!
But NVIDIA has no support for wayland and AMD has open source drivers that are built into the kernel. So, really I’d probably pick NAVI over Nvidia for those reasons. Also, especially because I’m perfectly happy with 1070 performance still, Navi is gonna deliver that just fine.
So you really only have two hoops. That’s number 1 installing it (but most popupar distros give you easy to setup and maintain repos for that). And then number 2 is dealing with Nvidia X Settings, witch is i don’t know. Just not fun to deal with and it took me forever to figure out at the start how to make it persist it’s settings. Eventually, after a billion trial and error reboots I managed.
I was thinking about waiting for the RX 5700 XT
Sounds like a good decision, considering it’s like 2 weeks away.