AMD vs Nvidia
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)
The nouveau drivers are just barely enough to have a desktop, anything actually needing a GPU will perform very poorly (in my anecdotal experience with 4K). Or, to put it another way, choosing an NVIDIA card is choosing their proprietary drivers.
So you're left with AMD (and Intel). The open amdgpu driver is pretty good and is suitable for gaming. Which I do.
I have no experience with Intel, but I believe their open drivers are pretty good.
So I recommend AMD.
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.
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.
My two cents.
I have quite a few Nvidia GPUs I still use (2080,3080ti,3090) but recently purchased two AMD cards. I have a 5700xt and 7800xt.
I recently started using Universal Blue Linux as my daily driver on most of my systems. Bluefin for my desktop with Nvidia, Bazzite for my gaming PC with AMD.
They do both work however I have still had more issues with NVIDIA than AMD. For example, running games tends to be buggier but that is specifically an Nvidia driver issue. I'm guessing most hot fixes come out for the windows driver first. For instance, FF7 Rebirth does not render world geometry on Nvidia on Linux. I do not have this problem under AMD
I started purchasing the AMD cards because I was growing tired of waiting for Nvidia stability on Linux.
Is it much better than it was before , yes Do you use Nvidia CUDA apps or AI? Check, that works! Is it still as smooth and seamless as AMD, nope, you're still going to end up with regressions.
I think it's only a matter time before Nvidia finally figured this out as they heavily rely on Linux as a platform in their own work. But right now your best user experience overall is going to be on AMD hardware.
In my experience older nvidia cards (~5 years old +) work fine, newer ones are very hit-or-miss
Amd cards of any age work pretty much perfectly as far as I can tell
Though if the drivers not being proprietary is a hard line for you then amd is your only option really
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 an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.
From what i've heard if your not willing to use the nvidia proprietary drivers then DON'T go for nvidia you will get terrible performance and amd will always be significantly better.
If you consider the proprietary drivers then I think it depends on your use case. For example AMD is better value if your gaming without ray tracing if you want to play with ray tracing or do any kind of productivity Nvidia is generaly the better option. For machine learning Nvidia has much better compatibility with everything so you will have a better time and better performance, Although if you only care about running the largest models you can with the available vram then AMD gpu's will have more vram for the price.
Intel arc is also always an option if you are aiming for a lower tire/mid range card. They have really price competitive cards and unlike amd they have very decent ray tracing and productivity capability's. They also have lots more vram for the price compared to Nvidia.
Also I highly recommend buying a used graphics card, you help the environment, save a lot of money and if you don't like the card you chose you can sell it for the same price your bought it and buy a different one.
Maybe if you could specify your use case and what cards you are currently looking at I could help you out more.
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.
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).
100% AMD, for sure. AMD won't make much problems and works ootb.
Nvidia on the other hand... if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won't work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won't cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won't give you the performance you paid for?
Also, Nvidia clearly doesn't care about PCs or its' users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?
I had a better desktop experience with the FOSS driver than the proprietary driver when testing a 2060 on Fedora 41.
if you are on linux AMD is the better choice, period.
don't get me wrong nvidia will work relatively well, ive ran it before on linux and its actually improving. but it isnt worth the pricetag to have tons of small issues everywhere.
Just not true anymore. Must have been years ago that you used Nvidia on Linux. As someone who has been using Nvidia GPUs under Linux (Manjaro KDE mostly), recently also under Wayland (since plasma 6), I can attest that the experience is very good, no "tons of small issues".
Still though, since OP wants no proprietary drivers, he has to go for AMD, since nouveau is dog shit.
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.
AMD is by far the best choice for foss drivers. Intel might be an option in the future but I have no experience with their new cards. A second option would be good for Linux users but it's unlikely to be 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.
As someone who started using Linux while on Nvidia and stuck with it for over a year before going full AMD.
Just go AMD, so many little things I had to find workarounds for just because of Nvidias shitty drivers.
Even after Nvidia claimed to support wayland I could never get it to run on my install, then having to manually configure my xorg just to get my 170hz monitor working which then introduced graphical issues I just couldn't fix...NONE of that was an issue the moment I swapped to a RX 7800 XT, didn't even have to install any drivers they're just standard in the kernal.
Same, been using an AMD card since building a new PC a few years ago and its been completely smooth sailing. My spouse also built a new PC at the same time but decided to go nvidia instead and has had constant problems (now regrets not going AMD as well) and has yo regularly downgrade the driver and/or kernel just to have a working system or games that don't have things like vertices explosions.
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.
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?
If you don't want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.
As for my experience, I've had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.
I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I've never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.
Honestly even on Windows I preferred AMD's software suite compared to Nvidia control panel and GeForce Experience. Currently using a 7900XTX and pretty happy with it. Also I missed Radeon Chill when I was on Nvidia, didn't expect to care about that at all, but I love it.
Both work, just in different ways. I think AMD's value proposition is better on Linux but if you were choosing between a 6700XT and a 4080 (for sake of example) of course the latter is still gonna be faster despite the drivers being a bit weirder to manage
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.
Only the kernel bindings are open source. The actual driver is still closed source. So that only leaves you with AMD and Intel.
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.
NVIDIA is more problematic than AMD on Linux. So AMD.
Just to add some variation to these comments.
Nvidia works absolutely fine on (arch) linux, that needs to be said. Performance is on par with windows.
Depending on what your needs are its the better choice. (I have a few pieces of software that greatly rely on CUDA)
But the elephant in the room is your need for non proprietary driver. The only open source nvidia does is the strict minimum to catch up and stay competitive on linux (they where losing before). There is a clear winner on this front. Que all the other comments.
Anything but Nvidia
If those are your criteria, I would go with AMD right now, because only the proprietary driver will get decent performance out of most nVidia cards. Nouveau is reverse-engineered and can't tap into a lot of features of newer cards especially, and while I seem to recall there is a new open-source driver in the works, there's no way it's mature enough to be an option for anyone but testers.
Do you play a lot of games with ray tracing, or do you care about that stuff? If you don't then AMD, it's better bang for the buck for rasterization and works better on Linux.
Does nouveau support RTX?
If by that you mean ray tracing, no. Nouveau can't and won't ever, NVK might but it will take time.
I haven't been on NVIDIA for a while so i couldn't tell for sure. I know that nvidia raytracing works on linux, but I'm not sure how it goes with the open drivers. If the noveau performance and stability is still somewhat lacking in general, then if both open drivers and raytracing are important to you then AMD is still the better bet.
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, ...
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.
Could be game specific, but there is no ground rendering in final fantasy. https://youtu.be/DxE-4ZxYxDA
A workaround's been developed for the issue regarding FFVII.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8408#issuecomment-2657340142
if( you need CUDA ){ Use Nvidia (note that OSs officially supported by CUDA often use "old" versions of linux, like Debian 12 (6.1) or Fedora 39 (6.8), I personally use Arch); } else { Use AMD, you will have less problems and it'll probably be easier to setup; }
Also do some research over whether you actually do need cuda if you need cuda. It's synonymous with a lot of AI stuff, but in my experience it all works with rocm anyway.
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.
AMD. Unless you need blender.
I am AMD and use Blender just fine. What do you mean?
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.
