GPU questions

a year ago by Focal to c/linuxfurs

Hi y'all! I've been using Nvidia GPUs for about all my life, but have been hearing how AMD usually plays nicer with Linux.

I'm somewhat new to this OS and all the distros, and I was wondering if you could help me with understanding some of the differences.

I currently have a 4080 from Nvidia, and I use it for both content creation and gaming. Back when I was picking out my new GPU, I wanted to pick the 7900 XTX from AMD, but I was on windows back then and the two GPUs were the exact same price in my region, so I figured I might as well pick that.

Fast forward to today and I am noticing that the 4080 is struggling a bit with games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. (I'm getting forty fps on medium/high settings with 1440p) and I see some people suggest it is because of the translation overhead of Nvidia via Proton, and that this would be reduced with AMDs GPUs, but I'm not entirely sure how much there is to gain here, really.

So.. TL:DR; What is gained and what is lost if I were to sell the 4080 and switch to AMDs 7900XTX or 9070XT?

I'm on arch Nobara, btw

Truscape 8 points a year ago

The major consideration is you are essentially trading raw power for a cleaner, less messy implementation of drivers in your system. You'll be getting a weaker card, but your main benefits have to do with not dealing with Nvidia's approach to Linux.

The technical understanding at the low level is beyond my current knowledge of how drivers are integrated into Distros as a whole, but from my research this is the overall gist:

Nvidia does not like having the community take charge of their drivers. When you install an Nvidia GPU on your system, you are installing a proprietary driver blob made by their company that cannot be easily modified or improved by anyone outside. This can work (on my own system that relies on CUDA for certain workloads, it's serviceable), but overall performance and efficiency gets left on the table because of it. There are community projects to create a full open source driver through reverse engineering (Nouveau), but it is very primitive and quite awful for gaming.
AMD, on the other hand, embraced allowing the community to do what they wish with drivers they released. It has gotten to the point that they have far greater efficiency than their Nvidia counterparts on the platform (And probably was a decisive factor in Valve including their APUs on the Steam Deck). Because of the lack of red tape on who can touch them, most Distros include their drivers by default, and don't have any extra hassle (don't even need to touch the driver menu).

I'm not sure if you're currently using the Nouveau drivers because you weren't aware of this (explaining your extremely low FPS), but if installing the third party drivers doesn't work, feel free to grab an AMD (or Intel, since things are getting good on their side) card for a more "It just works" experience.

And if you do, feel free to have some catharsis looking at this famous video of Torvalds bashing Nvidia's stubbornness: https://youtu.be/iYWzMvlj2RQ

save

path: 0 19855207, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 4

forestbeasts 5 points a year ago

Also it's not like the 9070XT is slow. We've got a 6600 and it's perfectly fine for basically anything that isn't VR (though we've got a 1080p 60Hz monitor, nothing special).

Yeah seconded on drivers. AMD drivers just work. Nvidia's can be a bit of a hassle.

save

path: 0 19855207 19856082, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0

Focal 2 points a year ago

Sorry, mega hectic day at work today. Just wanted to say I really, really REALLY appreciate your answer.

I am using the correct drivers for Nvidia, but I dunno why I'm getting such weird framerates. Probably because I shy away from upscaling and the like. That being said, I do like the idea of AMDs stability and openness to driver handling. I'll have to chew on this for a bit, but thank you!

save

path: 0 19855207 19870075, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

Dojan 2 points a year ago

Probably because I shy away from upscaling and the like

Depending on the game, this is very possible. Playing Remnant II with a friend of mine, an Unreal 5 game, and without DLSS upscaling and frame-gen, it doesn't run very well. Feels like Unreal 5 games in general have a tendency to run like arse without fake frames and fake resolution.

I'm on an RTX4070 Super. It works alright for me, but the 580 drivers are causing a lot of weirdness. Proton 10 stopped working altogether, and plenty of games just run weird with them. Sticking to 570 for now. Coupling with the weird issues some people have in VR with select headsets and nvidia I'd probably swap to AMD myself, just to avoid all the hassle that nvidia comes with.

Edit: I think someone mentioned Intel. I ran an Arc A770 for a while. Linux drivers are alright, but Intel honestly focuses more on machine learning than gaming. Gaming support was okay-ish, with middling performance. I was interested in giving VR a go however, and Intel doesn't support that at all.

save

path: 0 19855207 19870075 19871882, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

Truscape 1 point a year ago

Anytime, I love helping folks here on the fediverse! :)

save

path: 0 19855207 19870075 19870782, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0