I am going to buy a new graphics card and can’t choose between Nvidia and AMD. I know that Nvidia has bad reputation in Linux community but how really it works? And I heard recently their drivers got better. What can you recommend?
P. S. I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)
I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)
In that case AMD, no doubt about it.
If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.
I have no beef in this argument, and I’m certainly not biased in relation to AMD/Nvidia. However, my 980Ti, my 2070S and now my 4070S have all run really well under Linux. I run KDE Neon and a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570’ installs the latest beta’s in under 5 mins, if I want to roll back the driver a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-565’ has me back on the latest feature branch. Yeah, Wayland adoption under Nvidia was slow, and Nvidia’s earlier choices weren’t what anyone could call ‘ideal’ - But momentum is building, and as a result I’ve been using Wayland for about eight months now without issue. Before that, X11 was largely faultless running Nvidia hardware/drivers.
People say Nvidia struggle in relation to VKD3D performance. I’m not too sure what they’re doing, but VKD3D runs fine here.
It’s the one advantage we have over Mac users: We can run AMD, Intel and Nvidia. We also have ongoing OGL support, native Vulkan support, better game support under Steam, a larger user base under Steam, and the amazing Proton implementation.
Whether it be AMD or Nvidia, I personally think it’s Linux for the win. EDIT: I in no way see value for money in the new 5080/5090 cards and I eagerly await what AMD has to offer (although I won’t be switching from my 4070S for quite some time yet).
I don’t want any proprietary drivers
So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.
The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.
there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver
I mean, there is. It just isn’t recommended for most users.
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didn’t know this. is it no good then? does it have the HDMI 2.1 driver missing from the open source driver?
the driver is called AMDGPU PRO. it sits on top of the normal driver, and contains stuff specific to high performance compute and workstation workloads. i think it’s a requirement for properly fast ROCm but i’m not sure.
The proprietary part is in the userspace. For the kernel, they use the same open source base.
It’s the pro driver for workstation use. If you are gaming then you don’t need it. The gaming driver is only open source
I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.
The only reason I still go Nvidia is because I self host AI, which afaik takes advantage of CUDA and just runs overall better on Nvidia cards, or at the very least is easier to set up. Really, the top reason is that it’s the devil I know right now.
If I didn’t self host AI, I would 100% go AMD. Especially if you don’t want to use proprietary drivers. That being said, my old gaming laptop runs NixOS with Nouveau and there have definitely been improvements since I first tried it years ago, but I don’t do much gaming on it. It’s more a TV media station these days (so I can avoid the stupid smart TV bloat agenda, where your TV gets gradually slower and fits less increasingly-bloating apps over time).
If it’s just about self-hosting and not training, ROCm works perfectly fine for that. I self-host DeepSeek R1 32b and FLUX.1-dev on my 7900 XTX.
You even get more VRAM for cheaper.
This is very good to know. I read that ROCm can be a pain to get up and running, but I read that months ago and this space is moving fast. I may switch over when I can if this is the case. My 3080 is feeling it’s age already. Thank you!
That used to be the case, yes.
Alpaca pretty much allows running LLM out of the box on AMD after installing the ROCm addon in Discover/Software. LM Studio also works perfectly.
Image generation is a little bit more complicated. ComfyUI supports AMD when all ROCm dependencies are installed and the PyTorch version is swapped for the AMD version.
However, ComfyUI provides no builds for Linux or AMD right now and you have to build it yourself. I currently use a simple Docker container for ComfyUI which just takes the AMD ROCm image and installs ComfyUI ontop.
Definitely bookmarking this reply. I haven’t tried ComfyUI yet, but I’ve had it starred on Github from back when it was fairly new. I’m no stranger to building from source, but I have not dived into Docker yet, which is becoming more and more of a weakness by the day. Docker is sometimes required by some really cool projects and I’m missing out.
ROCm
I’m curious. Say you are getting a new computer, put Debian on, want to run e.g. DeepSeek via ollama via a container (e.g. Docker or podman) and also play, how easy or difficult is it?
I know that for NVIDIA you install the (closed official) drivers, setup the container insuring you get GPU passthrough, and thanks to CUDA from the driver, you’re pretty much good to go. Is it the same for AMD? Do you “just” need to install another package or is there more tinkering involved?
I’m curious. Say you are getting a new computer, put Debian on, want to run e.g. DeepSeek via ollama via a container (e.g. Docker or podman) and also play, how easy or difficult is it?
On the host system, you don’t need to do anything. AMDGPU and Mesa are included on most distros.
For LLMs you can go the easy route and just install the Alpaca flatpak and the AMD addon. It will work out of the box and uses ollama in the background.
If you need a Docker container for it: AMD provides the handy
rocm/dev-ubuntu-${UBUNTU_VERSION}:${ROCM_VERSION}-completeimages. They contain all the required ROCm dependencies and runtimes and you can just install your stuff ontop of it.As for GPU passthrough, all you need to do is add a device link for
/dev/kfdand/dev/driand you are set. For example, in a docker-compose.yml you just add this:devices: - /dev/kfd:/dev/kfd - /dev/dri:/dev/driFor example, this is the entire Dockerfile needed to build ComfyUI from scratch with ROCm. The user/group commands are only needed to get the container groups to align with my Fedora host system.
spoiler
ARG UBUNTU_VERSION=24.04 ARG ROCM_VERSION=6.3 ARG BASE_ROCM_DEV_CONTAINER=rocm/dev-ubuntu-${UBUNTU_VERSION}:${ROCM_VERSION}-complete # For 6000 series #ARG ROCM_DOCKER_ARCH=gfx1030 # For 7000 series ARG ROCM_DOCKER_ARCH=gfx1100 FROM ${BASE_ROCM_DEV_CONTAINER} RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y git python-is-python3 && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* RUN pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/nightly/rocm6.3 --break-system-packages # Change group IDs to match Fedora RUN groupmod -g 1337 irc && groupmod -g 105 render && groupmod -g 39 video # Rename user on newer 24.04 release and add to video/render group RUN usermod -l ai ubuntu && \ usermod -d /home/ai -m ai && \ usermod -a -G video ai && \ usermod -a -G render ai USER ai WORKDIR /app ENV PATH="/home/ai/.local/bin:${PATH}" RUN git clone https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI . RUN pip install -r requirements.txt --break-system-packages COPY start.sh /start.sh CMD /start.shVery cool, thanks for the in depth explanation.
AMD cards work great with the open source driver. As i understand it, the nouveau driver is getting better but might not be there yet? So if the non-proprietary driver is a must you might be better off with AMD.
Everyone’s gonna suggest AMD here because of your requirement of no-proprietary drivers; but unless you’re some sort of high-value target to a foreign government, I honestly choose the more pragmatic route of just using the proprietary NVidia driver and going NVidia. Especially if I’m not budget constrained on card.
The fact of the matter is, AMD has just simply fallen behind. NVidia cards are (and have been for like 3 generations now) more performant. There is good reason why they dominate the market right now; they’re just simply better.
It really depends on how far you want to take your zealotry on open source; there are parts of the CPU microcode that can see everything you do. Those are proprietary. Your bios is proprietary. You’re probably running 100 different proprietary blobs even IF you choose not to use the drivers that NVidia supplies; so why hobble yourself with a slower card that doesn’t have CUDA instructions? (often also very good for AI work if you are interested in that at all)
I certainly understand wanting to push that direction for the sake of pushing that direction but - is performance and stability less important than using a proprietary driver?
I often hear how prprietary drivers breaks and have a lot of issues. But AMD card usally work very stable
I wouldn’t say the proprietary nvidia drivers are any worse than the open-source AMD drivers in terms of stability and performance (nouveau is far inferior to either). Their main issue is that they tend to be desupported long before the hardware breaks, leaving you with the choice of either nouveau or keeping an old kernel (and X version if using X—not sure how things work with Wayland) for compatibility with the old proprietary drivers.
It was the opposite experience for me last time I tried an AMD card. But that was like 8 years ago.
If you’re on Linux AMD is clearly superior because NVidia has Linux performance issue compared to Windows so you’re ending up paying more for less. However NVidia has the monopole for a reason their product are superior but at what price ? Also if you want to avoid proprietary drivers AMD gets the win too.
I do think AMD is the better option for anyone that spend less than 800-1’000$ on a GPU even for Windows gamers. Personnaly I have made the switch from NVidia to AMD 2 years after ditching Windows for Linux, Never looked back even though Cyberpunk2077 looks amazing on NVidia RTX and some other things.
I have upgraded last year to a RX 7800 XT and have no regrets on spending that money.
When was the last time you used an Nvidia card under Linux? There are no performance issues compared to windows, haven’t been any in YEARS.
When playing the exact same games on the exact same machine with NVidia GPU you can get 8-20% better performance on Windows compared to Linux. On the AMD side you can get up to 5% boost on Linux, that’s just the reality. Though you could also loose 5% performance compared to Windows in some games.
And to answer your question it should have been around 2022.
Where are you getting these numbers? I have a 3080, used a 1080Ti before, and though my last direct comparison was a while (like a few years) ago, I had more like 3-5% difference in FPS in the games I tested, at most 10% in RS2 Vietnam, but this ultimately turned out to be a CPU bottleneck. I would assume (and, reading reviews on reddit, this seems confirmed) that the drivers have mostly gotten better since then.
Well it’s from my experience during lockdown when I started to dualboot Linux and Windows with an NVidia GPU and some benchmarks I’ve seen on YouTube recently.
How a CPU bottleneck could happen on an OS and not on another ?
Oh it happens on Windows too, but wine adds some overhead, so you have less headroom on Linux. Same goes for DXVK / VKD3D - they add some CPU overhead.
Legit
Here is a post with a video that seems to had the same experience I had a few years ago on NVidia GPU running on Linux.
Here is the YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LI-1Zdk-Ys
AMD. Unless you need blender.
I am AMD and use Blender just fine. What do you mean?
Cuda and optix are anecdotally three times faster at rendering than any amd solution.
That doesn’t mean amd doesn’t perform well though, its personal preference on how much that time saving is worth it.
AMD-HIP works just great for me.
“Works great” and “Could work 3x faster” matter to a lot of people.
Well then you’re just nagging about hardware, which isn’t the issue being spouted on here. Blender works with AMD hardware just great, which OP was saying is not the case.
Blender works with AMD hardware just great
No it doesn’t. That’s our point. It works 30% as fast as its competition. That’s not “working just great”…it’s working slowly and like shit. The whole damn point of a GPU is to accelerate that work. The work that your AMD-HIP is doing in blender, could take an hour, and the NVidia would pump it out in 20 minutes.
You’re bitching about hardware capabilities. Read OP’s comment and stop showing up just to comment if you can’t provide anything constructive except whining pedantry.
Blender supports cuda for much of its gpu work. It will work with amd. And there are projects allowing gpu rendering via amd. But they are (and have been for a while) a long way behind the cuda stuff.
For major rendering projects nvidia is still the fastest set up to use.
Like others have already said, if you want Foss drivers then AMD is your only choice.
However, if you want the most performant cards on the market then you can safely choose nvidia. The drivers work really well now, no tinkering required. Even multi monitor vrr works now with the latest drivers.
Stop listening to what people are parroting, nvidia used to be a bad choice, but not anymore. Even Linus Torvalds has changed his mind
So, when AI people came in, that was wonderful, because it meant somebody at NVIDIA had got much more involved on the kernel side, and NVIDIA went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of people who are doing really good work.
I put a 3060Ti in my latest build. The NVidia drivers would consistently hard lock my PC after about a day of uptime no matter what I did. I spent ages trying to hunt down the issue, and waited through several kernel and driver versions in vain hope, fuelled by people insisting that the NVidia drivers were “good now”. I switched to nvidia-open once that released (or once I realised it existed) to no avail. Nouveau was not available at all for those cards when I started and was still missing critical features at the end.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a kernel crash in nearly two decades of Linux computing. And second, and third and…
I switched to an AMD card, a 7600 (a generation newer! In case anyone thought this was a “new hardware” issue) and the problem was immediately gone, and my PC has returned to being my sanctuary.
My problem is exceptionally rare - I think i found one other person experiencing it over the course of 1-2 years. But the concept that NVidia had redeemed themselves continues to ring hollow for me.
If you’re unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel is your friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.
I have 2 PCs, both on Linux. One with an AMD XTX 7900 XT, the other one has an Nvidia 3080 TI.
The Nvidia one is running the latest proprietary drivers, and they suck HARD. They just are far inferior to AMD’s. The only reason to go Nvidia is to do local AI or video (editing / transcoding).
If your primary use is gaming and go Nvidia, you will be sabotaging yourself.
As someone who has been using Nvidia and Linux nearly exclusively for many years, I am interested in the aspects you think their drivers suck in. I have had literally no problems with them in the past 2 years, performance is incredible, Wayland just works, …
Anything but Nvidia
FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.
Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.
If you want Nvidia Reflex,DLSS and RTX and GSYNC,etc and your fine with installing out of tree proprietary drivers and fine with some minor issues(Like rarely breaking randomly) Nvidia If you don’t care about Nvidias features AMD.
