Hi so I was wondering what gpu vendor had the best support intel, amd or nvidia In the future I wanna upgrade my mid range pc and I dual boot cachyos (arch btw) and windows 11 (to play game that don’t work on linux)
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AMD. Not even a question, really. AMD has by far the best drivers. Intel is in a reasonable second place in that they at least have open source drivers and those drivers work well, but due to their newness in the discrete GPU space I still occasionally see issues on my A770. It is solidly usable for the most part though. NVIDIA? Dead freakin last. Their proprietary driver is a mess to install and only recently is able to render anything without screen tearing and unplayable flicker. The situation is improving though thanks to NVK, an awesome third-party, reverse engineered, open source driver that is seeing rapid improvement. I can play Overwatch at 165fps on my RTX3070 laptop finally, but only at lowest settings and 50% resolution scaling (it can do the same at ultra on Windows at 100%). I am very confident we’ll see NVK improve performance though.
i agree i dont like how on nvidia proprietary drivers its settings on wayland does not show everything and doesn’t amd make closed source drivers to ik there is 2 drivers for linux the amdpro and the open source amd driver Also your the dev of openrgb? Best software ever
On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.
On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that’s my most played game.
And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!
On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.
oh okay but yes its proprietary i think that is for commercial use
On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that’s my most played game.
Yep but they want to start open sourcing their drivers but am pretty sure not everything i also heard Nouveau is weaker then the Proprietary nvidia drivers
And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!
Yw, even your openrgb app works better then the asus one i always run into problems on that (Yeah i always turn off the rgb on my ram stick)
The key thing to note about NVIDIA “open sourcing their driver” is that they only open sourced the kernel portion. I see no intention of opening the userspace portion. GPU drivers have multiple parts. The kernel driver is the low level interface that passes data to and from the hardware while the userspace is what actually handles converting OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, etc. calls into GPU commands and that part is where most of the performance impact happens. NVIDIA is not open sourcing the userspace.
That’s why NVK/Nouveau are so important, because it is a fully open stack. It is also part of the Mesa project which encompasses all the open GPU drivers on Linux which makes it more integrated with the Linux graphics stack.
Quick reminder that nvidia has released opensource kernel level drivers recently that are comparable in performance to the proprietqry drivers
While that might be technically true, the kernel module is only a tiny fraction of the driver stack.
Also, I’m not interested in rewarding a company that spent decades making life difficult for open source users and developers, when there are competitors who have done far better (and have more experience) in this space.
The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.
The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.
Installed Linux recently… I guess thay explains why the game I tested out played like crap? Fps held until I moved the camera (or anything else was happening) amd dropped to like 3
Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It’s a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.
i think i wait about a minute or so
To add to this, you can also boot apex in the dx12 mode on Linux (this will switch it from DXVK to VKD3D).
The benefit of this is that the game will generate most shaders at the title screen ahead of time. This greatly improves first play experience at the cost of having to wait a little bit the first time you open the game.
There is a launch command for it? I might try
On Steam, I use
-novid -anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.json
true on apex idk why these types of games lag when i pulled out my shield it crashed the game Also beamng lags to hovering over 6-9 fps and somtimes it will not run at all the linux version even worse it does not run at all
I got one machine with an amd gpu and another with an Nvidia. The amd machine is so much more comfortable to use, it’s not even funny. The amd card just keeps chugging along and doing its job without bothering me, whereas the Nvidia card keeps making me make sure the drivers are properly loaded in the first place.
I’ve never used an AMD graphics card, but I recently got into gaming in Linux with my NVidia card and this is one of the things I have to deal with.
- I want to launch a game.
- There’s a problem
- Oh are my drivers up to date?
- apt-get update & upgrade
- check driver version
- check online for latest driver
- I think flatpaks need to be updated as well? I’m new to flatpaks too.
But yeah, you gotta check all the time.
AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.
Presumably some games at some point needed the user to update the kernel for an updated AMD driver?
It is definitely relevant if you buy new hardware when it’s initially released, although Mesa devs seem to be getting better at having it mostly ready by that point. I know historically there were times where you really had to be at the very bleeding edge, and updating to the very latest kernel and firmware was necessary.
Others have said it, AMD. Intel is weak and NVIDIA is a headache.
There is no best. Only least worst. Pick your poison:
AMD: Libre driver stack, require firmware blobs.
NVidia: Proprietary driver stack (kernel driver component slowly being opened), proprietary firmware exists in ROM on card so doesn’t need to be loaded at runtime.
Intel: Libre driver stack, same firmware issue as with NVidia, GPU performance generally sucks because iGPU constraintsI would say, in order from least-worst to most-worst:
AMD
Intel
NVidiaOthers that I have considered, but are hopeless pipe dreams
Matrox - old, deprecated, dead, no longer in business?
S3 Chrome - assimilated into Centaur/VIA technologies, later bought out by Intel
Mali - don’t even kid yourself
Software rendering - you must be desperate
Aspeed and other 2D framebuffer solutions - good luck
Any and every “open source GPU” initiative - always dead in the water. NLnet recently pulled funding from LibreSOC because the lead dev spent more time begging for e-gold than doing any developmental work.Prob the most detailed explanation here
You may not have considered the Intel Arc GPUs. Basically they were bad on Windows and are slowly improving, but unsure about their state on Linux. The cards were quite bad at some point, and well worse than an experience with NVIdia, despite the libre stack.
I would say the “best” depends on goals here. I generally encourage use of AMD over NVidia, but the difference is quite small. If you’re already going with CachyOS, then you’re well beyond the skill level to be able to navigate the tiny additional complexity of an NVidia card. Just buy the best bang for buck and your use case.
As for Mali, recent kernels and Mesa versions have made significant inroads. I do believe we’ll get pretty good support for Mali by the time the Qualcomm ARM Laptops become available for Linux.
I’d say amd or intel, but intel isn’t very good for stability or price-to-performance iirc
AMD. Sapphire. Nitro.
how about their newer gpus
