this is the parts are currently have.
amd 8350
asus sabertooth 990fx r2.0
I am going to buy new parts to make this a sli or crossfire build.
I am wondering what works better with ubuntu navida or amd graphics cards and what graphics card would work without bottlenecking the cpu.
Nvidia works about 100000000000000000 times better than amd cards with any linux system.
Also, avoid dual gpus. Even in windows, dual gpus have issues. Just get a single high end card.
Finally I would recommend getting a single 970. The GTX970 has a good price to performance ratio and your cpu should play well with it.
Wrong.
Also wrong depending on what your plans are with the machine you're building. The correct advice is, do not buy a 2 cheaper graphics cards in expectation of using an SLI configuration to get an increase in performance.
Please do explain.
I just sold my 290x for a 970 because even though I could kind of install the drivers, I consistently ran into all sorts of issues. TF2 would never work with the amd drivers what so ever and bioshock infinite was not smooth what so ever.
The only way the 290x ever worked-ish for me is with the opensource drivers which prevented me from playing bioshock infinite all together and made all of my wine games fairly laggy and almost unplayable.
On top of all of that phoronix has done several benchmarks that show that the open gl performance of the amd cards is a joke.
Unless you have some magical secret on how to make amd cards FULLY function on linux, then I do not see how I am wrong.
As for the SLI thing....sure, I agree that context is everything, but I went ahead and assumed he could not afford to sli titanxs like most mortals. And I am almost assuming that a 980ti is probably enough hore power for most linux gamers.
Historically speaking, Nvidia on Linux has been a nightmare and a joke. It wasn't until very recently, and because of the Android market that they finally started putting any sort of thought or real effort into drivers on linux. They've blatantly said that they will not support *nix on the same level they support Windows, Mac OS, or Android. You don't remember Linus publicly smashing them with a "Fuck you." and the finger in an interview a few years back ?
The truth is that the driver situation isn't perfect on either side of the fence, and individual mileage is entirely based on context. It's still wrong to say that Nvidia will run exponentially better in 100% of scenarios. If my experience with linux has taught me anything is that nothing, and I mean nothing is 100% clear cut in that way.
Closed source drivers for Nvidia are a cut above AMD from what I know, although there's a great deal of people saying that since Omega they've been very happy with the performance compared to previously. However new features, and updates/fixes for old features from both companies are a lot slower than desired, albeit for different reasons. Nvidia doesn't want to devote the time and energy into the task, and AMD can hardly afford to.
The open source drivers for AMD are rock solid, I've basically never had them not work 100% of the time and do exactly what they're supposed to. As for Nvidia, I've had all sorts of buggy bullshit problems with the open source drivers. Again, mileage is going to vary. You've got to consider that linux is designed to run on such a wide array of hardware that order to make it work, it has to find a middle ground in the way it's designed. They can't really focus on optimizing any one platform more than the other.
My use for this system is for LAN parties.
If you intend to primarily game, then yeah I'd suggest going with an Nvidia gpu, and installing the proprietary drivers for it.
No, the omega drivers are installable and they kind of work. They are by no means solid. At least for the 290x. I get all sorts of just flat out artifacting and other weird issues in all of my games. The opensource drivers are literally more stable and perform better than the closed source drivers and many other people agree.
The exception is the older 7000 series cards which a lot of people seem to be having luck with.
The ONE thing that might save AMDs ass is the kernel drivers. They should be open source and ideally we should finally see people making changes to the drivers directly which would be a real asset.
I will agree that the open source nvidia driver is junk though. Here is the hierarchy.
AMD closed source < Nvidia opensource < AMD opensource < Nvidia closed source.
Now what I will say is that the very latest build of mesa has open gl 4.X which could very well fix most of my issues
I have not tested it yet, and I am probably just going to wait for a couple mesa releases before I try it out.
Do not get me wrong either. I desperately want AMD cards to actually work well. I really like being able to pass through the nvidia card for the windows VM. But at the end of the day, AMD has caused me more headaches than what it is worth.
I didnt think passthru worked with Nvidia ?
I'll go with nvidia with this build. I do have a amd 7870 laying around and I might see how that works first. thanks for the help all.
I've got the same mobo with an 8370, 32gb of 1866Mhz ram and Linux Mint 17.1(basically Ubuntu LTS 14.04). I went for an Asus Strix R9 285, simply because it doesn't run it's fans unless it get hot, so silent in normal use. No problems installing the AMD drivers and terms of performance, no issues. It's used in conjunction with an 27" AOC Q2770PQU monitor running at 2560 x 1440. If you're a programmer it's very handy monitor, you can rotate it through 90 degrees for debugging long, deeply nested code. I've no complaints at all with my setup. However, I'm not a serious gamer, which may influence your choice.
If you have problems with on board sound breaking up, I've a fix for that, so get back to me if necessary.
Thanks for the info and I'll let you know if I got sound problems.