I’ve learned it best to use nvidia drivers with nvidia cards and the AMD drivers with the AMD cards. I recommend this for performance.
Thank you for posting this!! I can’t get an erection. I tried using an AMD driver the other day with my NVIDIA card and was stumped why my screen was blank. I’d give you gold if I could!
I think it’s more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
That’s the thing with AMD drivers, they’re the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you’d never know it’s there. It stays nicely out of the user’s way, you don’t even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
Removed by mod
15 years ago this was true lol
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
You might not remember ATI atrocity.
i’d argue it was the opposite back then. i have PTSD from fglrx
That’s fair. Mint did not care much with my old AMD Phenom 2. It had so much screen tear
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
Never had an issue with my Nvidia card. OBS can use the hardware encoder out of the box. Just a few weeks ago upgraded to a AMD card and had to set some “advanced” settings in OBS to do the same. Really happy overall, but after seeing this meme for years I expected rainbows and sunshine but was unpleasantly surprised in that regard.
my nvidia card caused sleeping and hibernation to randomly and regularly fail, and it made me very vary of system updates breaking random things.
I never use sleeping or hibernation, so can’t attest to that functionality.
Updates never broke random things for me with regards to the gpu. My install is 7 years old, so it’s been updated a lot.
My nvidia card prevents suspend working properly, but to be fair my previous nvidia card had the same problem when it was in a Windows machine.
My nvidia card causes horrendous screen tearing in VR if my monitor supports variable refresh rate. I have to unplug the gaming monitor to use VR
I don’t have VRR monitors and only occasionally dabbled in VR, to my experience without issues besides ALVR disconnecting from SteamVR sometimes. I picked up the VR set now that my system is beefed up and I still have the same issue sometimes, so I’m not chalking this up to my older Nvidia card or drivers.
Intel be like that skeleton at the bottom underwater
this has not been my experience with AMD drivers…
I run a legacy NVIDIA graphics in my ten year old laptop. GeForce 750M. The proprietary drivers are faster and have real video acceleration but haven’t been updated in forever and don’t support Wayland.
Nouveau works okay. I haven’t gotten video acceleration to work yet, even with installed firmware. Nouveau-vulkan is a bit buggy.
In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn’t quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.
I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I’d always done them when LMDE6 was current.)
* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn’t modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don’t limit it.
A decade ago it used to be opposite. How far Nvidia has fallen.
Considering their stock price has grown by 27,557% in those 10 years, I don’t think too many people at the company are concerned with their “falling”
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/NVDA/performance/total-return
It sucks that they abandoned us, and it’s awful that they’re a huge part of the AI bubble,. But, this is like an artist who used to play on Tuesday evenings at your local live music venues “selling out” and now playing stadiums.
I’m super annoyed at Fedora workstation at this moment. My 240hz Samsung monitor can’t use HDMI to get to 240hz, regardless of the quality of the cable. I have dual monitors and one is already using the type c so one of my monitors have to be 120hz.
I haven’t had any issues with my nvidia GPU. I did some distro-hopping and didn’t have any nvidia issues in any of the distros I tried.
If you want everything to work out of the box, I would recommend Bazzite. Pop! OS had me using the AMD image and fetching the nvidia driver manually (the nvidia image just didn’t work for me). After that, everything worked brilliantly.
Bazzite just works unless you have a Gigabyte b550 motherboard. Guess what I have?
the nvidia desktop version of bazzite didnt work with vulkan for me. it was still attempting to use mesa drivers for it. this was after debian where what i was trying to do required bleeding edge drivers which obviously wasnt going to work. then i just said fuck it and went with ubuntu like i have my entire linux career. you can hate on me, but it honestly works good enough
No hate, fam. Penguin brothers stick together
Thanks
Wow, opposite issues! Bazzite worked out of the box for me, but Ubuntu was awful. I spent several hours just to get my wired internet to work, threw every fix I could find at it, eventually fixed it with a modprobe, used it for a few days and decided that Ubuntu wasn’t for me.
Big ooof!
On one hand, setting up complicated stuff is a challenge and also fun.
On the other hand, I don’t wanna pay a company doing propreitery stuff.
On the other feet, prices are increasing due to chatbot girlfriend arms race between richest dudes on earth; are GPUs really even worth it anymore?
PopOS has been running great for months on my 3070, but I’m about to swap it for a 5060TI and I’m a bit worried.
And then you try a libre distro and realize you still need firmware with amd lol.
Libre distro just means hunting down firmware packages to get things to work .
Well from my my understanding the problem is that you can’t pick and choose specific firmware to run on top of the libre kernel, cause they patched it in such a way that it doesn’t really allow you to do it (not sure how it works specifically). I looked into this a bit cause i’m using gnu guix now, but pretty much the only firmware i need is the one for amdgpu. For everything else i could get by with the libre kernel, so i thought it would be neat if i could load only that one specific firmware, but it seems to only be possible to go full libre, or you just need to use the regular linux kernel with its firmware.
Edit: as i was typing this i realized that the nonguix kernel does differentiate between linux firmware and amdgpu firmware. I might have to try removing linux firmware to see if that works, cause if that’s the case then i can pick and choose my specific firmware after all.
You might have to compile your own kernel to get this to work.
It’s always that one firmware you need. Pure libre is only worth it for the ideologically pure, or if you just need a TTY.
Yeah i just edited my comment, i think the nonguix kernel might actually allow you more finegrained control over which firmwares you want to load. I’ll have to experiment with that a bit.
Edit: can now confirm that removing linux-firmware from my config and only keeping amdgpu-firmware in it only loads the gpu firmware. Could easily tell because my wifi card on my desktop needs firmware, and it stopped working afterwards (i’ll probably try to find the specific wifi firmware as well, but not a priority cause i pretty much never use wifi on desktop).
