I dislike Nvidia on Linux right now

There i said it.

Plymouth is always broken, ridiculous i want to boot my machine today not have to use fall back mode, this has been an issue for years now . Desktop performance in terms of smoothness is worse than AMD , something im sure to do with power save modes and re-clocking. vsync is still bugged in KDE. Prime is getting better but its still better to just disable it.

Swap over to my non gaming AMD build running the AMDGPU drivers and its fine. If there is one thing you want opensource on your machine driver wise its the video drivers.

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Depends on the specific graphics card from which manufacture. I know lately the popular concensus has been that the amd drivers on linux are super fucked, but that's not always the case depending on which amd card you have.

Funny enough, while looking into what to do when I go 100% Linux, I came accross many people saying the exact same.

Not sure where you heard that. I've got a r9 380 and it outperforms my 970 in Linux. amdgpu (non-pro) vs nvidia 352. 1440p.

That and it takes way too long to get nvidia drivers to even work. Most of the time, I can't even boot a livecd with an nvidia gpu attached.

I was AMD for years but the catalyst driver sucked in much the same way Nvidia does now for boot and desktop issues. The mesa open source wasn't powerful enough and lacked many openGL extensions. Fast forward 3 years and my GTX760 although running the actual games very well the things mentioned above are slowly ruining the experience.

vsync, frame latency, smoothness i experience much better quality here on the AMD opensource GPU. Again on my Kaveri i don't have the same power as the desktop Nvidia card but running a game like TF2 feels butter smooth and with no tearing or paging, the video input lag seems much lower too and more immediate. Source engine games in particular are a lot nicer on the open source AMDGPU driver.

Right now i put the new 370.28 drivers on in the correct manner and on boot plymouth is locked and the keyboard can't enter a password so i have to reboot and go into recovery mode to enter the password and then boot.
It was working fine on the open source Nouveau Nvidia driver. Not to mention it screws up the resolution to 640x480 where as again the opensource Nvidia driver was running the boot splash at 1440p native. This bug comes and goes as it pleases on every driver update.

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I want to use Nvidia for the performance, but I can't justify it if I'm not going to be able to get the software to work reliably. :/

My next GPU will be AMD. I didn't really want an Nvidia card, it has been my first but i had no choice.

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Well, it's been a few years, so you made it last. Be happy about that. Some people get new cards every year or so.

Yea i tend to squeeze every ounce of value out of my purchases. If they release a 490 i think it will be time to upgrade. I try to go for triple to four times the performance between jumps other wise its just wasting cash.

Agreed. I'm eager to see what vega has to offer. I want something to outperform the fury x before I jump.

I think the 1080 is roughly four times the performance of the GTX760 in most scenarios. It is also three times the cost of what i paid for the GTX760. Thats a price per performance ratio of 25% improvement to me (if that makes any sense) . I don't mind paying some more but Nvidia's pricing is faintly ridiculous and I would like a bit more value.

Yeah it does make sense.

Only a little ridiculous.

/s

By the time the RX490 is out, freesync and other such goodies as Kernal 5.0+ will also be here.

Hopefully. You can't know for sure.

Freesync is coming in 4.9 (so only a few more weeks until you can try it), I actually really want to get a Freesync monitor now. Kernel 5.0 however isnt coming for next few years I think as 4.0 just came out last year and both 2.x and 3.x were around for several years

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Well the AMD gpu drivers for certain cards on Linux are also garbage as far as i´m concerned..
Unfortunatly, Linux has still to come a long way as far as drivers are concerned.

But 4.4 is way back for AMDGPU . AMDGPU pro. Mint / Ubuntu use that. If you were serious about cutting edge performance Kernal 4.8 and soon 4.9 with many improvements is the answer. That means Arch/Manjaro/Antergos. Of course you could easily manually install a later kernal on Mint / Ubuntu / Debian but this can step you outside of the distributions patch cycle as your not using a dependency the same.

I recently installed a instance of the latest Mint and the best drivers it had were many months out of date for both AMD and Nvidia. For instance the default closed source driver was 361.45 ( now on 370.28 ) and mint does not come with the ubuntu graphics PPA for the latest versions as default which isn't good. Im not sure how they are going to choose to keep pace with the fast changing pace of the AMDGPU update cycle if they don't even ship drivers from this quarter.

Yeah i realy hope that the 4.9 kernel is going to have decent support for AMD drivers,
open source or proprietary.
Because it realy takes too long for decent support.

Apparently there are some more improvements for AMDGPU on 4.9. 4.9 will be the next LTS kernal but by that time all the faster distributions like Arch will have access to newer kernals. Right now the RX480 can bench similar to a gtx1060, sometimes slower by 15%, that's not awful. Perhaps it is for someone who comes from a windows perspective and craves every single fps and benchmarks a lot. Some tests have the 480 performing at 980ti level on the open source driver ( well they are now all open source from AMD since catalyst is dead ) given the price thats really decent.

I always try to look at these things in a more realistic light. so i tend to compare the last gen Nvidia range vs the current gen AMD range rather than both current gen cards against each other, nvidia are always a half step in front on release cycle and performance. But there also a full step behind on their pricing :)

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