My Experience Switching From NVIDIA To AMD
My Experience Switching From NVIDIA To AMD
TLDR: From my experience, in 2023, the Mesa drivers with an AMD GPU provide an experience that is way better than NVIDIA with their proprietary drivers. And if you're helping a friend get into linux, and or linux gaming I think you should steer them towards an AMD GPU.
"It just works", is how I would describe my computer after making the switch to an AMD GPU.
Having migrated from Windows I came over with an NVIDIA GPU, and for a long while my experience with using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers was fine. I had started with Manjaro, then moved to EndeavourOS after getting tired of Manjaro forgetting to renew their keys. EndeavourOS was an order of magnitude better, but eventually I got tired of tending to Arch and settled onto Fedora. Everything worked well enough so when I upgraded away from a 2070 Super I sought out a 3080 Ti, and again things were smooth. Issues didn't start cropping up until I upgraded monitors.
I went from 2560x1440@144hz to 3440x1440@240hz and on Fedora running under Wayland I could only get a max of 144hz. I tried using both HDMI and Displayport and could never budge past 144hz. Another issue that arose was I would need to manually turn my monitor on before booting my computer, otherwise I would not get an image, this was also the case for waking the computer having to manually turn on the monitor. Even after a fresh install of Fedora 38 these issues persisted.
Eventually I got tired of the issues I was experiencing on Fedora and decided to just try vanilla Arch. Using archinstall I was up and running with in no time, and to my surprise I was getting 240hz under X11 and Wayland. Tearing, and stuttering on X was detracting too much from the whole experience, so naturally I wanted to use Wayland.
Having gone with Gnome the amount of work required from my end to use Wayland was just too high. Even after getting the Wayland session up and running I still noticed odd graphical glitches, with enough frequency that I couldn't just live with them.
Eventually my 7900 XTX arrived, did a clean install with archinstall, and that's that. Everything just worked out of the box. It was refreshing that config changes I made were only because I wanted to, and not to enable basic functionality.
As a nice bonus seeing Processing Vulkan Shaders has become a rare occurrence after switching.
AMD on linux is just really, really good.
Some annoyances exist though, like trying to use hardware en(!)coding while retaining the mesa drivers for gaming. HW Enc. is only available with the proprietary amdgpu-pro drivers, which are no good for gaming. You can work around that by using distrobox to setup an arch container on any distro and then using the AUR to install the proprietary drivers and obs in that container. That way, the rest of the system still runs on mesa, but obs loads with hardware encoding support. You can then export obs using distrobox-export -app obs-studio to make it available on the rest of your system like any other app. On nvidia, you install the proprietary drivers anyway, so obs will let you encode on hardware right away.
Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with Nvidia in all those distros!
Just wanted to add: if you are stuck with Nvidia but want to get started gaming in Linux, install Pop!_OS . They have carefully tweaked Ubuntu to make even Nvidia "just work". It works for me so far, on 2560x1440 @75Hz.
I would rather have some distro freedom with an AMD GPU but unfortunately my main (Windows) game (DCS World) does not work well in VR specifically with the RX7000 series drivers yet.
Good to know, I've just ordered a steam deck and if I find that I'm able to play everything I want on there, I might even move my main pc across.
The only real game with anticheat I play is csgo and with Cs2 imminent, I can't imagine valve would lock Linux out on that.
I made the mistake of not getting rx7000 series so I guess I reap what I sow.
Thank you!
Talking about games, I'm so happy I don't have any title that I play stuck on Windows. None EAC games always worked for me when I started using Linux full time, but I was only able to delete my Windows partition after Apex added support for EAC on Linux. Ever since I haven't looked back :)
Did they fix the issue where installing Steam would nuke the desktop?
Same experience here. I recently made the switch and love how so many regular annoyances disappeared.
Wish I bought my computer with AMD graphics, nvidia works for me now but it's still a struggle to get it how I like.
I had a similar experience switching from my GTX 1070 to a 6700XT last year. Things had improved significantly over the years I used the 1070 but the experience has been overall much more seamless after switching
I don't know how you all manage to have so much trouble. The only issue of note I've had with nVidia is the machine not hibernating by itself. Apart from that, it's always worked without much fuss for the last fifteen years (not sure what I used before that).
Same here. I keep shaking my head in disbelief when I read all this "you need this custom niche distro if you want nvidia without problems" posts, and then look at my totally uncustomized Debian Stable PC, on which I've been playing modern games for many years now. :)
Really, the only trouble I've had was not Nvidia related at all - in the very beginning when Steam Linux client was released, Debian had too old glibc, and I had to resort to LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LD_PRELOAD tricks with glibc snatched from an Ubuntu package. But next Debian release fixed even that, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
I'm so mad at myself for impulse buying the rtx 3080... can't wait to switch to team red completely in a couple of years. Or do you think someone is willing to swap their AMD for my nVidia card? 😂
Does AMD have something that rivals DLSS? Some games are sadly very dependant on it nowadays.
There's FSR2 which is similar to DLSS without frame gen They're also developing FSR3 which will apparently give "up to a 2x increase" of frames by also using frame gen.
A pro of FSR is that it's open source so it's easier for developers to put it in their games themselves.
And FSR also works on non-AMD hardware, which is pretty neat.
Thanks!
As someone who hasn't tried to game on Linux but just use it as a server with my old pc hardware, dealing with nvidia shit is just a massive pain in the ass.
I was only using one monitor and yet it'd never pick up edid properly and other random quirks.
I chucked an Intel arc in there for av1 encoding on jellyfin and after getting to kernel 6.2 it also "just worked".
It's amazing how much of a difference it can make when the manufacturer gives even one quarter of a shit about Linux.
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I literally can't wait to replace the GT 710 my computer currently has with something that has proper support from AMD
I'm using a GTX 1080 still and looking to upgrade to an AMD card. What's a solid card I can get under $600?
edit: thanks dudes, picked up a 6700xt for $350
6700xt is very solid. I game at 1440p and as long as I don't turn ray tracing on, it runs all of my games above 60fps at max settings. Admittedly I don't play many AAA games. The most demanding game I've tried on it is probably Cyberpunk 2077.
I own a 6700xt and also play in 2k - there's a great price quality relationship with this card and it performs great. This card will absolutely do the job and way more than enough - Unless you want to experience ray-tracing or VR but also linux sadly is not the best platform for those features
Think I'll pull the trigger and get that, only $350 so it's decent. Now that I think about it, 2077 was also the last demanding game I played lol. My 1080 chugged on that. Also Gears of War it struggled. Doesn't bother me too much anymore, idc about triple A games now. Mostly getting for better Linux support.
Best bang for the buck is probably the 6700XT. It will run all the the biggest games at 1440p with decent fps. If you're at 1080p, there's nothing it can't handle. If you're looking at 4K gaming, you're going to want a bit more juice if you want good framerates.
If you're willing to buy used there are mega cards going for under 600 on most marketplaces. Surplus, and little interest from consumers have brought back cheap second hand hardware. It's really a buyers market right now.*
- At least in the US
I’m thinking about building a steam box and this is how I feel too