Just waiting for it to arrive on linux...
I could care less about gaming FPS performance, I'd much rather AMD cards had even a fraction of the support for open source AI tools that Nvidia currently has.
And that’s fine but this is c/pcgaming 🙂
True, but it's also a thread about Linux users. Seldom does a Linux user solely use their computer for gaming, though gaming may be the primary driver for a video card upgrade. Not being able to fully utilize emergent technologies, especially with the prices of today's GPU's, is a huge downside to purchasing an AMD card.
Fair enough!
That said, being able to use it without any driver shenanigans if you want it for gaming is a huge upside to purchasing AMD.
being able to use it without any driver shenanigans
That's simply not true, though I keep seeing it repeated.
I ran a 3090 on arch, and I never had any issues with drivers. Albeit I didn't mess around with Wayland, but that seems like more of a Wayland problem. I have a 7900XTX on arch now, and I swear it's been far more of a hassle than the 3090 ever was. Both cards seem to work fine with Steam/Proton, though the AMD needed a lot of tweaking to fix various Xwindows issues, not to mention 80% of the AI tools simply won't run on it.
That’s simply not true, though I keep seeing it repeated.
That is factually true, unless you're happy with the performance of Nouveau or whatever the OSS Nvidia driver is called.
To get an Nvidia card working you need a proprietary driver. Many distros can get it for you automatically during install but that still doesn't mean it won't cause issues. Every time there's a kernel update, DKMS needs to kick in and recompile the driver for the new kernel. If that fails for any reason, you might end up without a GUI on your next boot. To fix that, assuming it's even possible, you need some level of savvy. There's the lack of Wayland support, which is a problem for many, especially with Plasma 6 looming over the horizon and being Wayland-only.
I ran a 3090 on arch, and I never had any issues with drivers
Great! I'm glad your setup works flawlessly for you. Saying it always will for everybody is disingenuous at best though.
Albeit I didn’t mess around with Wayland, but that seems like more of a Wayland problem.
There you go. And no, it's not a Wayland problem. It's a lack of Wayland compatibility in the drivers. Fixing that is completely outside of the scope of Wayland.
I have a 7900XTX on arch now, and I swear it’s been far more of a hassle than the 3090 ever was.
I have a 7900XTX on Debian now, and zero hassle. I don't know what Arch has done to make your life difficult but it shouldn't have been the case. I have also run Nobara, Fedora and Bazzite on this hardware without a single issue. Well, I did have issues with Bazzite but none related to the GPU.
For my current Debian setup, the only GPU-related "tweaking" I had to do was to copy firmware blobs from the upstream kernel tree because some of them had not yet been packaged for the distro. This is a one-time operation though, and well documented.
the AMD needed a lot of tweaking to fix various Xwindows issues
Granted, I've been mostly on Wayland and KDE/Plasma but I have dipped into X every now and then for performance comparison. Never had a single driver issue.
Not saying your experience is invalid in any way but it shouldn't really be the case. It might be some quirk of Arch.
not to mention 80% of the AI tools simply won’t run on it
Yeah we established AI is a problem. It's irrelevant to gaming though, which is what we're discussing. I wonder if whatever tweaks and hacks you had to do to your AMD Radeon system to use AI on it might be part of the causes of your problems. No idea, honestly - but again, irrelevant.
Every time there’s a kernel update, DKMS needs to kick in and recompile the driver for the new kernel. If that fails for any reason, you might end up without a GUI on your next boot.
Ah yes, the FUD bogeyman.
DKMS has been around for over 20 years, "But it might fail! I have anecdotal evidence!" I mean if that's the case, we should probably stop using cell phones and laptops because batteries are known to swell and explode, right?
[2023-08-09T17:44:06-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.86.05-8 -> 535.98-1)
[2023-08-12T11:34:32-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.98-1 -> 535.98-2)
[2023-08-19T04:37:07-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.98-2 -> 535.98-3)
[2023-08-19T17:05:46-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.98-3 -> 535.98-4)
[2023-08-23T23:43:09-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.98-4 -> 535.104.05-1)
[2023-08-25T03:23:33-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.104.05-1 -> 535.104.05-2)
[2023-09-10T02:51:42-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.104.05-2 -> 535.104.05-5)
[2023-09-13T07:29:48-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.104.05-5 -> 535.104.05-6)
[2023-09-22T10:21:43-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.104.05-6 -> 535.104.05-7)
[2023-09-25T02:37:05-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.104.05-7 -> 535.113.01-1)
[2023-09-26T19:27:38-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-1 -> 535.113.01-2)
[2023-10-07T21:30:02-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-2 -> 535.113.01-4)
[2023-10-12T10:02:53-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-4 -> 535.113.01-5)
[2023-10-22T23:45:35-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-5 -> 535.113.01-6)
[2023-10-26T09:21:52-0600] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-6 -> 535.113.01-8)
[2023-11-05T16:29:19-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (535.113.01-8 -> 545.29.02-2)
[2023-11-14T00:42:25-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.02-2 -> 545.29.02-4)
[2023-11-23T14:14:47-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.02-4 -> 545.29.02-5)
[2023-11-24T09:02:20-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.02-5 -> 545.29.06-1)
[2023-12-01T07:18:54-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.06-1 -> 545.29.06-2)
[2023-12-11T19:54:24-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.06-2 -> 545.29.06-5)
[2023-12-20T22:16:01-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.06-5 -> 545.29.06-6)
[2023-12-25T07:04:48-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.06-6 -> 545.29.06-7)
[2024-01-03T15:14:06-0700] [ALPM] upgraded nvidia (545.29.06-7 -> 545.29.06-8)
"But it's proprietary!" So you have an issue with using a proprietary driver, but you're perfectly fine with running Steam and the thousands of proprietary games on Linux?
AMD just works? Well sure, but then you reference some obscure blog post as "well documented", at the same time saying a DKMS driver install might fail and it might not be possible to resolve, as if booting off a rescue USB and downgrading packages isn't a well documented procedure.
Hey, sorry if I hit a nerve. It really wasn't my goal.
That said:
“But it might fail! I have anecdotal evidence!"
I never said that. I haven't provided anecdotal evidence either. It's not hard to find it though: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=dkms+failure+nvidia&ia=web
Ironically, you're the one presenting anecdotal evidence. Your own. Nothing more.
“But it’s proprietary!”
This is a strawman, I'm not going to engage.
AMD just works? Well sure, but then you reference some obscure blog post as “well documented”
Like I said, the blog post is mine. It documents how I set up my system. From there, there are links to Debian's official docs. If you had actually read any of it, you would have found that out yourself.
Also, it's nothing to do with drivers. It's firmware.
as if booting off a rescue USB and downgrading packages isn’t a well documented procedure
Ah yeah - booting off a rescue USB and downgrading the kernel plus going through DKMS on a live system (perhaps a chroot, I'm not sure what the procedure would be). That's what I consider smooth sailing and no shenanigans!
The firmware that's missing on Debian's packages are present in other systems by default - and they're only missing on Debian because they're still fresh. They're static so you install them once and are done with it for the life of the system. No recompilation, no reinstalls, nothing at all.
Furthermore, the GPU works without them, but it lacks some functionality and it can have an impact on performance. The system never becomes unstable or without a GUI though.
Apologies. I have a 3090 in my old system which I run headless in a closet as a dedicated AI LLM/image generator. When buying a new system, I listened to all the "Nvidia sucks, AMD just works!" hype, and opted for a 7900XTX. To say I'm disappointed is an understatement, and I sincerely wished I had not listened to the Linux community at large.
But yes, ESO/Neverwinter/Solasta and the few other RPG's I play under Proton/Steam work well and rarely crash.
Ah yeah - booting off a rescue USB and downgrading the kernel plus going through DKMS on a live system (perhaps a chroot, I’m not sure what the procedure would be). That’s what I consider smooth sailing and no shenanigans!
Compared to what you documented in your blog? Not to mention the rescue CD is if DKMS fails, your steps are just to get it working.
No need to apoligise! I get that you're frustrated and why. AMD is really not (yet?) anywhere close to Nvidia for AI (or Ray Tracing!).
Compared to what you documented in your blog?
Yes. What I documented on the blog is a few commands once in a lifetime, from the comfort of your GUI, with the browser running where you can copy-paste from directly into the terminal emulator. I do consider that a lot less faff than booting off a live USB and figuring out how to compile a driver that DKMS failed to do automatically, then make sure it will work when I boot from my actual system.
Not to mention the rescue CD is if DKMS fails, your steps are just to get it working.
Not quite. The system works fine without that. In fact, I played a few games with no issues whatsoever before I figured out there were firmware files missing. In fact, the only thing that tipped me to thag were errors in dmesg which I only looked because I'm a stickler for that kind of stuff and decided to poke and prod as many logs as I could when I was building the system.
Also like I mentioned, this is only necessary because Debian haven't packaged those files yet. Many distros have them out of the box.
In any case, I know that plenty of people run Nvidia on Linux and face no issues. I have no interest in AI stuff on my Linux box and I have no love lost for Nvidia. That, coupled with AMD having been historically a lot friendlier to Linux than Nvidia, plus the fact that the drivers compile and ship with the kernel, made my purchase decision pretty easy. To each their own though, and clearly for your needs Nvidia is the way to go.
So going back to the start of the conversation, neither GPU is completely shenanigans free. Both require research, documentation, and additional work. Linux has a learning curve.
Does AMD 'work out of the box'? Sort of, but it really depends on the card and distribution. I know with Arch for example, things like scrolling in Youtube were horrendously laggy and I spent a few hours trying to install missing packages trying to figure out what was wrong. I haven't tried any other distros with an AMD card, but I've run PopOS, Ubuntu, and Arch on Nvidia without significant issues (other than modifying the kernel cmdline), but let's be honest that's less work than setting up almost anything else you're going to run on Linux.
Booting off a USB is also incredibly easy, and it's probably something everyone should have some experience with. Less than 3 hours after a fresh install I accidentally removed my user from the wheel group and lost sudo privileges ...
same!
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