Best gpu vendor for linux?
Best gpu vendor for linux?
Hi so I was wondering what gpu vendor had the best support intel, amd or nvidia In the future I wanna upgrade my mid range pc and I dual boot cachyos (arch btw) and windows 11 (to play game that don't work on linux)
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I got one machine with an amd gpu and another with an Nvidia. The amd machine is so much more comfortable to use, it's not even funny. The amd card just keeps chugging along and doing its job without bothering me, whereas the Nvidia card keeps making me make sure the drivers are properly loaded in the first place.
I've never used an AMD graphics card, but I recently got into gaming in Linux with my NVidia card and this is one of the things I have to deal with.
- I want to launch a game.
- There's a problem
- Oh are my drivers up to date?
- apt-get update & upgrade
- check driver version
- check online for latest driver
- I think flatpaks need to be updated as well? I'm new to flatpaks too.
But yeah, you gotta check all the time.
AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.
Presumably some games at some point needed the user to update the kernel for an updated AMD driver?
The only instance I can see this is if a game requires a new Vulkan extension, which wouldn't need a new kernel but would need a new Mesa version to provide that extension. For the most part, games use established and standardized APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D) to utilize the GPU and as long as the driver implements the APIs used by the game, the driver doesn't need to continuously update in order to support game updates. On Linux, the driver doesn't handle Direct3D anyways and an intermediate layer (DXVK or VKD3D) is used to translate Direct3D API calls into the Vulkan API. Vulkan does support extensions which are added every so often to provide new interfaces and the userspace portion of the driver (which is responsible for compiling/translating Vulkan API calls into raw GPU instructions) needs to be updated to support these, but also sometimes these extensions are optional and games can use less optimized code paths to work around missing extensions.
Ah I see, thanks for the info.
It is definitely relevant if you buy new hardware when it's initially released, although Mesa devs seem to be getting better at having it mostly ready by that point. I know historically there were times where you really had to be at the very bleeding edge, and updating to the very latest kernel and firmware was necessary.