2y ago

Is AMD really that much better?

Hey everyone,

I'm currently rocking a 3080 I bought second hand in my Arch Linux rig. It works great under xorg but not so much wayland. There are a number of bugs and gaming performance is worse. I would like to use wayland in general for the mixed refresh rates with dual monitors. My question is: Is AMD really that much better than Nvidia? Is the AMD experience issue free with wayland? Also, how is hardware encoding with AMD? I'm particularly curious how performance is for game streaming with sunshine. I currently use nvenc hardware encoding which is amazing and feels like there is no latency. Does AMD have a similar experience?

Thanks!

36 comments

It's more of "NVIDIA bad" than "AMD good". AMD does what is expected in the Linux world, to make open source drivers that are part of the Mesa project. That shouldn't be an amazing feat of awesomeness, that should just be standard procedure. However, when the competition is so horrifically bad at drivers on Linux, following the standard makes AMD look amazing. For what it's worth, I have an Intel Arc A770 on my Linux setup and it works great. Intel also follows the standard procedure of making their drivers open and part of the Mesa project. However, AMD has been in the graphics card (and driver) game for much longer and their drivers have a lot more optimization, plus Valve has put work into making AMD's drivers better for gaming workloads over the past several years (especially given the Steam Deck runs an AMD GPU). Hopefully Intel gets more performance parity with AMD in the Linux driver world as time goes on. It's definitely gotten much better since launch already.
As for NVIDIA, maybe NVK can make them even sort of useful without the nasty proprietary drivers but reverse engineered drivers are always going to take longer to get anywhere near the same performance of ones written based on actual official documentation.

You can't really use Wayland with Nvidia. Whether it'll ever be possible will be up to Nvidia...if they release open source drivers, then it will. Otherwise, no chance. I have a 3080 and use Manjaro XFCE. Gaming is nearly flawless. But it's not Wayland.
Couldn't judge sunshine etc. as I don't stream.
Generally, I'd say you'll do much better with AMD on Linux, if you don't rely on Nvidia specific features.
- I use Wayland KDE daily with Nvidia. It's not the most polished experience but it's far from 'no chance'. The only problems I've experienced are YouTube download gui not working, task bar randomly freezing (which isn't an Nvidia specific issue according to the kde issue tracker comments), visual glitches on kde panels with blurred backgrounds and the computer not waking up from sleep (didn't try troubleshooting or running x so might be solvable).
  Edit: Remembered more things unrelated to Wayland but might be related to Nvidia. Kde system monitor reads all nvidia gpu data as 0 even though it shows up correctly in nvtop. And all ttys except the default are outputed from the igpu which makes troubleshooting annoying.
  
  Thanks for the additional info. I thought Nvidia and Wayland were basically incompatible. This sounds like there's been nearly enough progress to make this a daily runner! I'm hoping to be able to switch someday, but won't for the time being.
  
  Yeah wayland has been working surprisingly well for me here too. It's just annoying that they've again fucked up and now can't have a monitor above 144hz if there is more than one enabled.... Literally aids.

From a FOSS standpoint, AMD is clearly better since Nvidia doesn't provide an open source driver and actively prevents one from being developed (that is feature complete) by anyone else.
From a gaming standpoint, I don't think it makes much difference either way. Both companies make cards and have drivers that work very well for Linux gaming. Nvidia are usually a bit faster at supporting new cards on Linux, but that only matters if you are buying a card right at launch.
The main sticking point is Wayland vs Xorg. While you CAN use an Nvidia card for Wayland at this point, you are likely to run into some issues and it won't be as nice of an experience as AMD. Nvidia will probably fully support Wayland eventually, but there is no guarantee.
Finally, if you need CUDA you just go with Nvidia.
It really comes down to your exact needs and how much you care about open source software as a principle.

I had lots of issues with Nvidia and none whatsoever with amd. I had to troubleshoot sleep, set environment variables and all kinds of crap to even get Nvidia working but it was never glitch free.
Get a amd card.

Nvidia drivers have (slightly) more timely support for the latest cards, and more mature support for non-3D uses of the GPU, especially scientific computing. To a large extent they are the same code as the Windows drivers, and that has positives in terms of breadth and maturity of support.
For everything else, the AMD drivers are better. Because they are a separate codebase from the Windows drivers, and are part of the de-facto Linux GPU driver stack Mesa, they integrate much better into the overall Linux experience, especially around support for Wayland. Unless you have an absolutely bleeding-edge card, they "just work" more often than the Nvidia drivers. If you like doing serious tinkering on your Linux system, then the AMD drivers being fully integrated and having the source available is a major win. Also, it used to be that the Nvidia drivers did a much better job of squeezing performance out of the hardware, but today there's very little in it, and the AMD drivers might even be a little more efficient.
I've got both AMD and Nvidia GPUs currently in different machines, and I much prefer the Linux experience with AMD. I don't think I'll be buying another Nvidia GPU unless the driver situation changes significantly.
FWIW I don't stream so I can't comment on the exact situation, but I have used the video encode hardware on AMD cards via VAAPI and it was competent and much faster than x264/x265 on the CPU. I think OBS has a plugin to use VAAPI (which is the "standard" Linux video decode/encode acceleration interface that everyone but Nvidia supports).
- but I have used the video encode hardware on AMD cards via VAAPI and it was competent and much faster than x264/x265 on the CPU.
  Yes, it's faster than the CPU, which is no surprise, but the quality is incredibly worse than NVENC. I switched to AMD earlier this year and I knew that the AMD video encoder wouldn't match NVENC, but the difference is much bigger than I've ever thought.

I haven't read anything you wrote other than the title, but yes AMD is so much better, everything just works, nothing breaks with updates, no weird quirks,... It's just so much QoL you get by using AMD
- Plus they didn't put millions of dollars into marketing their product in the early 2000s to become a household name, yet are still heavyweights in the game. Always respected the hell out of them.

When i had Nvidia, i had to install the latest driver always manually, booting RL3 in console and install the new driver "by hand". Under the bottom, i was happy with my Nvidia card, but i switched to AMD not even a year ago. Since then, "it just works" :)

- You might be exaggerating a little bit on the dates, 10 years ago in 2013 AMD was pretty shit on Linux. You had to choose between the closed source catalyst driver that made you have to prevent Xorg from being updated, or enjoy the slideshow with the Radeon open source one. The new driver only got announced in 2014, and released in 2015. I hear it's much better now, but hadn't had the chance to test it yet.

I'm using AMD and I don't remember having any issues. I'm using GNOME with Wayland and it works perfectly fine (I also have 2 monitors with different refresh rates btw). I also have sunshine set up as well and the latency is unnoticable. Last time I tried (a week or so ago) it suddenly stopped working tho because all encoders are failing. Before that it was using vaapi and worked just fine.
Edit: I just tested it and vaapi is working with mpv, so it's probably an issue with sunshine

After using arch with my 1070 Ti for 3 weeks, Nvidia driver updates have caused major issues twice already and from what I read around the Internet, I think it's pretty safe to say that all nvidia cards become progressively worse experiences over time. Haven't tried arch on AMD yet, but I will soon. Nvidia and especially their driver devs can suck a dick.
- I'm curious, what exactly did break?
  
  First time I installed CUDA, it worked for a bit and then I rebooted and got stuck on "loading initial ramdisk". I had to chroot in from the installer and remove both cuda and the nvidia driver.
  The next time I ran a normal system upgrade and steam didn't launch anymore, so I had to manually downgrade the nvidia packages.

Repeating what I have been told recently, AMD only fully supports the consumer grade 7k+ series of GPUs. The other consumer stuff is a whole different thing when it comes to ROCm, HIPS, and the AI frontier. From what people have said about gaming, the AMD stuff is great.
For shitvidia the best integration of the proprietary binary blob is on Pop OS. Nvidia has also worked directly with RHEL for a seamless experience, so Fedora has this same integration. Still, no Wayland due to a lack of benevolence from the hardware rental overlords of criminal exploitation that is shitvidia.
I hate that I have to buy their junk because there is no portable hw alternative that works with AI right now. I've been on Wayland for years and must step way backwards to x11 because Nvidia is run by thieves stealing property ownership using digital exploitation.
- @j4k3 @SpicyTofuSoup I use red hat because of the proprietary drivers, I get rocm and everything on my ryzen 5 zen 3 integrated apu.

I've had many issues with AMD to be honest. I have used a Vega 64 in my desktop and a Radeon 680M in my laptop and both experienced numerous hard system hangs. The Vega 64 eventually got better, but the Radeon 680M is still dealing with a lot of ring0 hang issues: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2220. I mostly get these hangs when using Firefox's hardware accelerated video playback while running in Wayland. People in that thread seem to think its an issue with accessing VCN.
Regarding video acceleration itself, the Radeon 680M also seems to not work properly in Firefox. Videos will frequently get stuck on a frame before continuing normal playback after a few seconds.
Meanwhile, my Nvidia 3090 on my desktop has been working without issue. Sure you don't get Wayland, but I don't really have a need for it just yet and I vastly prefer being able to use DLSS and raytracing. Wayland also needs a few patches to enable tearing protocol support and a few other fixes that help input latency before I switch over. The upcoming Nvidia 545 drivers are supposed to help out their Wayland support quite a bit, so I am excited for that.

No issues gaming with a 5900x/6800xt but I cannot comment on streaming. I really enjoy not having to install the additional NVIDIA drivers anymore. Encoding works well with Openshot and OBS(local screen captures)

I gamed on both green and red. Nvidia drivers messed things up very often back then. I built a new gaming rig one year ago and went straight with amdgpu, no matter the question. Never had any issues. Bad thing atm is that GNOME is still working hard on VRR. There is an AUR patch available which is either buggy or outdated atm. Thats why I switched to KDE to use FreeSync. Performance related I think they both good, to me it was more a choice of compability and less hassle.

Is AMD really that much better?
As someone who swapped out their RTX 3060 for an RX 6900 XT, yes, yes it is. Everything. Just. Works. Display sync, high refresh rate, Wayland, Source games (yeah some native source games just won't play nice on NVIDIA randomly, lmao), driver installation (or lack thereof). It's just a WAY better experience, especially not having to track down and install NVIDIA's drivers. Seriously, you don't realize how much of a convoluted (and frustratingly distro-specific) process it is until you switch to AMD.
NVIDIA will play nice if you put in ALL the work it needs to behave, X11, proprietary drivers, etc. Don't play by its rules? Then Jensen Huang himself put a pipe bomb under your pillow. If you don't mind catering your setup to NVIDIA, then you won't really notice a difference. I mean, in all fairness I now cater my hardware to Linux, buying only AMD/Intel GPUs, so I can't judge.

Great question. All I know that my Ryzen 7 4800H and 1650ti laptop can handle a bunch of wine game, but my 7600X and 6700XT setup barely runs wine games, and most of them are seriously laggy.

36 comments