linux - nvidia or amd top end card

[milomak]

which of these perform better in linux especially where steam is going to be a factor?

i'm guessing this will mean going proprietary drivers?

 

[knoober]

My amd cards work fine under any distro I have tested with, but I have oy setup Steam under Arch. I have no Nvidia cards to test with, but I believe there are less hoops to jump through. Your choice of distro will impact the difficulty of getting your card running in games also.

. IIRC here is a vid that might help answer some questions about drivers (been a while since I watched it)

 

[DreamingWolf]

The only limitation with AMD GPUs is the delay between the release of the card and getting driver support for it into the kernel which is usually a 6-9 month lag. Nvidia proprietary drivers cover the newest cards from day one.
So it comes down to how cutting edge you want to go with your card, and what the release cycle is for the distro you run.
For the absolute top level cards, I would still go nVidia, though you will pay through the nose for a 2080ti. For anything below the absolute best, AMD will be as good, if not better, AND less expensive than nVidia.

 

[petteyg359]

I use Gentoo and bumblebee/primus (optirun -b primus) with a GTX 980M and nvidia-drivers on my laptop and a Vega FE and in-kernel drivers on my desktop. Either works for everything Steam-related.

 

[HankB]

With Nvidia you will need proprietary drivers for top performance. They have recently released more information on some chips but I don;t think that has made it to the open source drivers. AMD OTOH has either released open source drivers or the necessary information but require binary blobs for some cards. On Debian I needed to install firmware from non-free to get something other than a blank screen.

I have no idea which will work better with steam.

 

[Acidburn]

Nvidia can be a big hassle in Linux sometimes depending on the Distro and I imagine some other factors.

One warning I have always read is to try the open source version of drivers first(whatever that means I really don't know a lot about them).

AMD on the other hand most of the time work out of the box with no trouble.

AMD is more friendly with the opensource community on things than Nvidia is(search up about Linus talking smack about nvidia and you will see that it isn't Linux fault but Nvidias refusal to be more open).

 

[CJustin]

which of these perform better in linux especially where steam is going to be a factor?

i'm guessing this will mean going proprietary drivers?

You will have to go with proprietary drivers only. And it that case, NVidia gets the proprietary drivers faster and better than its AMD counterparts.
So if you want better performance and latest edge technology then go for NVidia.
Regards.