this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
741 points (95.7% liked)
Linux Gaming
15516 readers
34 users here now
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I bought an AMD GPU before and the experience was so horrible that it's deterred me from ever buying one again.
I never knew how good I had it with Nvidia until I tried AMD. The main issue? Drivers. AMDs drivers were abysmally shit. I never had to 'choose' specific versions of Nvidia drivers to get them to work. I did with AMD, and some features would work while others would break depending on the version.
Ended up returning it because it was that bad.
On Linux all the drivers are included with the kernel. No software to manage either, it just works. Nvidia drivers need to be installed separately on Linux and are generally very low quality with performance and technical issues.
Idk about Windows though, never used an AMD GPU on it personally. My Nvidia GPU has always worked perfectly on Windows.
So I guess it's just your OS choice really.
I think the counter argument is also valid and the open source drivers are in the kernel, but proprietary drivers that... I actually dont know how to get, so I use Nobara... Proprietary drivers seem key to some of the performance gains I'm getting with my AMD + Linux rig.
Nah. It's my experience with both Linux and Windows.
That's bizarre, I have the opposite experience ha. Nvidia drivers with my 1660 produced buggy video output nearly 100% of the time, even idling on desktop would randomly cause black bars to appear every few frames. I tried 3 different driver versions but each one broke something different. Both X11 and Wayland sucked. On the Nvidia forums the devs were basically apologizing and saying it would be fixed later in these huge threads of people documenting similar issues. To my knowledge a lot of my issues still exist with my hardware.
My 5700 worked flawlessly OOTB without any tinkering. Open-source MESA drivers were packaged with my Debian 12 install and they have never stuttered or bugged out on me. I literally do not even think about my GPU setup anymore, it just works and required 0 configuration on my end.
Did you just have a different hardware setup? Was this a brand new release of an AMD GPU that just didn't have good driver support on your distro yet?
Sounds like they probably last used AMD devices shortly after the ATI acquisition, and yeah for awhile the drivers were absolutely shyte (as they were with ATI).
The second possibility it's - as you mentioned -, running bleeding-edge (i.e. trying to run a video device just released). I got a 6900XT early when they came out and drivers were a bit finicky for maybe the first 1-2mo. I think I had to manually download the firmware files to get it running. However, I've had the same issues - or worse - with other vendors in that regard.
Apart from that, then anything in the last half decade shouldn't require any driver installs and minimum to no tinkering. It's all
Nah. It was an RX 580.
I think instead of damage control for AMD, you could try to open your mind to the possibility that their drives may not be so superior that they work for everyone just because they work for you.
It's at least possible, right?
Funny, I was very much in camp NVidia until the RX480, which ran just fine. So did my Vega56, and my 6900 as well as numerous APU's (one was a bit annoying for overscan on the attached TV). No driver installs, just what came with the OS.
I've also got a tablet with an Intel Iris chipset that works fine with the in-kernel driver, and a laptop with an Nvidia chip that most of the time worked but periodically after a kernel update fails to output video requiring me to manually piss around with it and figure out why the stub didn't build properly.
Maybe you should stop being an ass and consider that when the product/brand has worked for MANY people, maybe the issue is you
Hmm. You're right. It's me with my exotic hardware and configurations, not the drivers that many other people outside of /r/linux routinely complain about. My bad. Different AMD drivers breaking some things and fixing others (while never being fully functional) is because of me. The drivers are literally perfect, and have been for years.
Lol. Delusion is just not a river in egypt. Keep fanboying, gonna block you now.
Nah. Nothing weird or wrong about my setup.
Everything worked fine with my Nvidia 660ti. When I switched to an RX 580, I had issues with refresh rates and Freesync (that I can remember, it's been awhile and I don't care to keep all this recorded.) Some versions of drivers would fix issues but cause others. Some versions required certain configurations to fix issues but cause others. It was a mess.
Switched back to the 660ti, no issues. Bought a used 1070, no issues.
Haven't gone back to AMD since that horrendous experience, but maybe they've improved.
I think it's sad how few people here are willing to acknowledge that AMD's drivers may not have been adequate for most users even if they worked for them. I bought AMD listening to ya'll, and was horribly disappointed.
I guess that's part of why theory is no substitute for experience.
I guess it's just weird since you're the first person I've ever seen complain about them! Sorry you had a bad experience.
I had similar issues with Linux on AMD.
When I was due for an upgrade, I chose low to mid-range AMD card supported by new open source drivers on Linux. Literally 0 issues and nothing to install. Pure plug and play. Am not sure about performance gain or loss since I haven't touched Windows for a while.
With nVidia it was annoying and occasionally painful experience. Annoying because you had to install drivers and sometimes nVidia stops supporting your card, so you have to chase older drivers which might not be supported on your OS now, etc. On occasion those drivers would break after update and my system simply won't start and I would have to revert to Nouveau to get any work done. Didn't happen often, but enough to be annoying and the fact they chose the worst moment to break made it painful.
One thing I really liked about AMD cards that makes me happy I have one right now is output ports. AMD seems to be pushing more modern connectors than nVidia. In same generation I had nVidia with HDMI and VGA, while AMD pushed for HDMI and DVI, which can push analog but is at the same time digital. Since I like having two displays AMD's choice was better. These days I use fiber optic HDMI cable for TV and having card with 3 digital connectors is very nice. Pushing 3 displays with nVidia card at the time was problematic if impossible. My solution was usually to have built-in Intel card push TV HDMI and other two displays were on nVidia, but since nVidia likes stepping over open GL libraries there was no hardware acceleration for Intel.
Granted this is all thing of a past but I don't think I'll switch from AMD anytime soon as they seem set on providing good quality open source drivers.
That's nice. It's interesting how many people say one works better than the other based on their own experience.
I think it's a testament to why people should go with what works best for them, and not just what people on the internet say works best.
Am well aware nVidia is better optimized for games, or rather games are better optimized for nVidia. However to me, gaming is a secondary concern and getting work done primary one. So not giving me troubles while using it scores highly on my necessity list. That said I also think people should get what they want and what works best for them. Even though figuring that out is probably a harder task than it sounds.
@superguy windows or linux?
Both. The experience was horrible on both.
oh no