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)

  • jul@discuss.tchncs.de
    22·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • brisk@aussie.zone
      1·
      1 hour ago

      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.