AMD vs Nvidia

The nouveau drivers are just barely enough to have a desktop, anything actually needing a GPU will perform very poorly (in my anecdotal experience with 4K). Or, to put it another way, choosing an NVIDIA card is choosing their proprietary drivers.

So you're left with AMD (and Intel). The open amdgpu driver is pretty good and is suitable for gaming. Which I do.

I have no experience with Intel, but I believe their open drivers are pretty good.

So I recommend AMD.

I don't want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

In that case AMD, no doubt about it.

If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.

My two cents.

I have quite a few Nvidia GPUs I still use (2080,3080ti,3090) but recently purchased two AMD cards. I have a 5700xt and 7800xt.

I recently started using Universal Blue Linux as my daily driver on most of my systems. Bluefin for my desktop with Nvidia, Bazzite for my gaming PC with AMD.

They do both work however I have still had more issues with NVIDIA than AMD. For example, running games tends to be buggier but that is specifically an Nvidia driver issue. I'm guessing most hot fixes come out for the windows driver first. For instance, FF7 Rebirth does not render world geometry on Nvidia on Linux. I do not have this problem under AMD

I started purchasing the AMD cards because I was growing tired of waiting for Nvidia stability on Linux.

Is it much better than it was before , yes Do you use Nvidia CUDA apps or AI? Check, that works! Is it still as smooth and seamless as AMD, nope, you're still going to end up with regressions.

I think it's only a matter time before Nvidia finally figured this out as they heavily rely on Linux as a platform in their own work. But right now your best user experience overall is going to be on AMD hardware.

If you want Nvidia Reflex,DLSS and RTX and GSYNC,etc and your fine with installing out of tree proprietary drivers and fine with some minor issues(Like rarely breaking randomly) Nvidia If you don't care about Nvidias features AMD.

If you're unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel is your friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.

I don't want any proprietary drivers

So then you don't want any NVIDIA.

The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.

I have an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.

From what i've heard if your not willing to use the nvidia proprietary drivers then DON'T go for nvidia you will get terrible performance and amd will always be significantly better.

If you consider the proprietary drivers then I think it depends on your use case. For example AMD is better value if your gaming without ray tracing if you want to play with ray tracing or do any kind of productivity Nvidia is generaly the better option. For machine learning Nvidia has much better compatibility with everything so you will have a better time and better performance, Although if you only care about running the largest models you can with the available vram then AMD gpu's will have more vram for the price.

Intel arc is also always an option if you are aiming for a lower tire/mid range card. They have really price competitive cards and unlike amd they have very decent ray tracing and productivity capability's. They also have lots more vram for the price compared to Nvidia.

Also I highly recommend buying a used graphics card, you help the environment, save a lot of money and if you don't like the card you chose you can sell it for the same price your bought it and buy a different one.

Maybe if you could specify your use case and what cards you are currently looking at I could help you out more.

100% AMD, for sure. AMD won't make much problems and works ootb.

Nvidia on the other hand... if you already have a Nvidia GPU, then the proprietary drivers work pretty well, but even those won't work flawlessly and still cause problems for many people.
And the FOSS drivers are still in the early stages and won't cut it. So why spend lots of money for a piece of hardware that won't give you the performance you paid for?

Also, Nvidia clearly doesn't care about PCs or its' users, so why support such a shitty company with your money?

I have no beef in this argument, and I'm certainly not biased in relation to AMD/Nvidia. However, my 980Ti, my 2070S and now my 4070S have all run really well under Linux. I run KDE Neon and a quick 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570' installs the latest beta's in under 5 mins, if I want to roll back the driver a quick 'sudo apt install nvidia-driver-565' has me back on the latest feature branch. Yeah, Wayland adoption under Nvidia was slow, and Nvidia's earlier choices weren't what anyone could call 'ideal' - But momentum is building, and as a result I've been using Wayland for about eight months now without issue. Before that, X11 was largely faultless running Nvidia hardware/drivers.

People say Nvidia struggle in relation to VKD3D performance. I'm not too sure what they're doing, but VKD3D runs fine here.

It's the one advantage we have over Mac users: We can run AMD, Intel and Nvidia. We also have ongoing OGL support, native Vulkan support, better game support under Steam, a larger user base under Steam, and the amazing Proton implementation.

Whether it be AMD or Nvidia, I personally think it's Linux for the win. EDIT: I in no way see value for money in the new 5080/5090 cards and I eagerly await what AMD has to offer (although I won't be switching from my 4070S for quite some time yet).

if you are on linux AMD is the better choice, period.

don't get me wrong nvidia will work relatively well, ive ran it before on linux and its actually improving. but it isnt worth the pricetag to have tons of small issues everywhere.

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.

AMD is by far the best choice for foss drivers. Intel might be an option in the future but I have no experience with their new cards. A second option would be good for Linux users but it's unlikely to be NVIDIA.

FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.

Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.

As someone who started using Linux while on Nvidia and stuck with it for over a year before going full AMD.

Just go AMD, so many little things I had to find workarounds for just because of Nvidias shitty drivers.

Even after Nvidia claimed to support wayland I could never get it to run on my install, then having to manually configure my xorg just to get my 170hz monitor working which then introduced graphical issues I just couldn't fix...NONE of that was an issue the moment I swapped to a RX 7800 XT, didn't even have to install any drivers they're just standard in the kernal.

If you don't want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.

As for my experience, I've had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.

I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I've never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.

The only reason I still go Nvidia is because I self host AI, which afaik takes advantage of CUDA and just runs overall better on Nvidia cards, or at the very least is easier to set up. Really, the top reason is that it's the devil I know right now.

If I didn't self host AI, I would 100% go AMD. Especially if you don't want to use proprietary drivers. That being said, my old gaming laptop runs NixOS with Nouveau and there have definitely been improvements since I first tried it years ago, but I don't do much gaming on it. It's more a TV media station these days (so I can avoid the stupid smart TV bloat agenda, where your TV gets gradually slower and fits less increasingly-bloating apps over time).

Both work, just in different ways. I think AMD's value proposition is better on Linux but if you were choosing between a 6700XT and a 4080 (for sake of example) of course the latter is still gonna be faster despite the drivers being a bit weirder to manage

I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I'm very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don't game much.

Honestly even on Windows I preferred AMD's software suite compared to Nvidia control panel and GeForce Experience. Currently using a 7900XTX and pretty happy with it. Also I missed Radeon Chill when I was on Nvidia, didn't expect to care about that at all, but I love it.

Only the kernel bindings are open source. The actual driver is still closed source. So that only leaves you with AMD and Intel.

AMD cards work great with the open source driver. As i understand it, the nouveau driver is getting better but might not be there yet? So if the non-proprietary driver is a must you might be better off with AMD.

NVIDIA is more problematic than AMD on Linux. So AMD.

Just to add some variation to these comments.

Nvidia works absolutely fine on (arch) linux, that needs to be said. Performance is on par with windows.

Depending on what your needs are its the better choice. (I have a few pieces of software that greatly rely on CUDA)

But the elephant in the room is your need for non proprietary driver. The only open source nvidia does is the strict minimum to catch up and stay competitive on linux (they where losing before). There is a clear winner on this front. Que all the other comments.

If those are your criteria, I would go with AMD right now, because only the proprietary driver will get decent performance out of most nVidia cards. Nouveau is reverse-engineered and can't tap into a lot of features of newer cards especially, and while I seem to recall there is a new open-source driver in the works, there's no way it's mature enough to be an option for anyone but testers.

Do you play a lot of games with ray tracing, or do you care about that stuff? If you don't then AMD, it's better bang for the buck for rasterization and works better on Linux.

I have 2 PCs, both on Linux. One with an AMD XTX 7900 XT, the other one has an Nvidia 3080 TI.

The Nvidia one is running the latest proprietary drivers, and they suck HARD. They just are far inferior to AMD's. The only reason to go Nvidia is to do local AI or video (editing / transcoding).

If your primary use is gaming and go Nvidia, you will be sabotaging yourself.

Anything but Nvidia

Everyone's gonna suggest AMD here because of your requirement of no-proprietary drivers; but unless you're some sort of high-value target to a foreign government, I honestly choose the more pragmatic route of just using the proprietary NVidia driver and going NVidia. Especially if I'm not budget constrained on card.

The fact of the matter is, AMD has just simply fallen behind. NVidia cards are (and have been for like 3 generations now) more performant. There is good reason why they dominate the market right now; they're just simply better.

It really depends on how far you want to take your zealotry on open source; there are parts of the CPU microcode that can see everything you do. Those are proprietary. Your bios is proprietary. You're probably running 100 different proprietary blobs even IF you choose not to use the drivers that NVidia supplies; so why hobble yourself with a slower card that doesn't have CUDA instructions? (often also very good for AI work if you are interested in that at all)

I certainly understand wanting to push that direction for the sake of pushing that direction but - is performance and stability less important than using a proprietary driver?

If you're on Linux AMD is clearly superior because NVidia has Linux performance issue compared to Windows so you're ending up paying more for less. However NVidia has the monopole for a reason their product are superior but at what price ? Also if you want to avoid proprietary drivers AMD gets the win too.

I do think AMD is the better option for anyone that spend less than 800-1'000$ on a GPU even for Windows gamers. Personnaly I have made the switch from NVidia to AMD 2 years after ditching Windows for Linux, Never looked back even though Cyberpunk2077 looks amazing on NVidia RTX and some other things.

I have upgraded last year to a RX 7800 XT and have no regrets on spending that money.

Could be game specific, but there is no ground rendering in final fantasy. https://youtu.be/DxE-4ZxYxDA?si=ziYDWr5VAj7LV7hz

if( you need CUDA ){ Use Nvidia (note that OSs officially supported by CUDA often use "old" versions of linux, like Debian 12 (6.1) or Fedora 39 (6.8), I personally use Arch); } else { Use AMD, you will have less problems and it'll probably be easier to setup; }

Why are you avoiding proprietary drivers? Will using them damage you in some way?

Until Intel and AMD figure out a way to deliver feature parity, the only factor is choosing a card should be "does it do the thing I need?". An example use-case for me is having CUDA cores for Blender renders.

I've been using Linux for 30 years, and (notwithstanding laptops that only had CPU graphics) I've used nVidia cards the entire time. I get the driver's from APT, and never had any issues.

AMD. Unless you need blender.

Edit: to make my point clear. To some religiose like venting below.

Nothing I said says don't use amd on blender.

I said AMD unless you need blender. IE for everything but blender use AMD for blender their is a need to consider both.

As others have pointed out. The software development history of blender means for certain tasks nvidia is much faster. And will be for the foreseeable future.

If you need blender then the choice is more complex then just amd.

A do not really do anything gpu intensive other then blender. So for me nvidia even with their drivers makes sense.