AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2).
I sort of figured that HDMI stupidity was strategically a good thing as it sort of brought the dynamic of the HDMI consortium and VESA. specifically how they treat the end users, more to the public eye.
That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
Purely rumor, but supposedly Valve put tons of pressure on them (no idea by what means, again this is all rumor) because they wanted support for the Steam Machine release.
Unless you're on the absolute newest stuff with DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DP1.4. That'll be Nvidias 2000 through 4000 series. No DisplayPort 2.1 until the RTX 5000s.
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
Some people have TVs or displays that only use HDMI. I personally wouldn't recommend HDMI if DisplayPort is available, but if HDMI is your only option, then having it work properly will be important.
My monitor has 1 displayport and 2 hdmi and I have 2 computers I use with it. They can't share the displayport. All comparable monitors (last time I checked) have the same. So it'd be nice if both worked.
AMD does a lot of work to ensure their support for Linux is first-class.
With the kernel now natively supporting their systems, you can expect good support.
It's earned them some good will over Nvidia
which has gotten better recently with the rise of AI, but still requires users to jump through a couple of hoops due to their attempts to protect their IP.
It is more than that, I really like openbsd as a desktop system. This is niche enough that I have zero expectation for any sort of support from the hardware vendors. However, because the amd drivers are opensource. Heroic people in the obsd dev community are able to make it work there. I don't strictly need a gaming gpu for my desktop work, but it is nice to have a setup I can boot linux on to play games with.
Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
I built a Linux gaming PC a few years ago, running Bazzite.
AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
Nvidia makes a fine GPU. The problem with Nvidia on linux is the drivers. You're beholden to Team Green for driver updates, and when they decide not to support a GPU anymore, that's it. Now, linux does have the nouveau driver, but that doesn't support all the hardware or much 3d at all, and never will.
I particularly got fed up with Nvidia on linux playing War Thunder - I had a regular crash that Gaijin and Nvidia each blamed on each other, and I never did get it fixed.
Nvidia driver updates can also leave you stuck with no desktop environment on occasion and while fixable, it's a pain in the rear. However, when the drivers are right, Nvidia performance is second to none.
AMD has drivers built right into the kernel, and as long as you have whichever nonfree firmware repos your distro supports (I use Devuan, a Debian derivative), AMD cards 'just work'. If using xorg, install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu for modern cards, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon for older cards. I'm currently playing on a Radeon 9070 (non-XT) on a 1440p monitor with plenty of performance. I know that it also works on wayland, but I have no experience there.
AMD began the process of open-sourcing their Linux graphics drivers more than 20 years ago. At that time, they had no working open-source drivers yet; they'd only just released some hardware documentation. I told myself then that if they came through and delivered open-source drivers, I was an AMD customer for life. I've more or less held to it. I don't remember the last time I considered NVIDIA an option.
NVIDIA has apparently open-sourced the kernel drivers for their most recent couple generations of graphics cards. That's great! But they have a hell of a lot of catching up to do. Their kernel drivers aren't in the mainline Linux kernel. Their userspace drivers are proprietary, whereas AMD's are open-source. AMD's kernel drivers are built into Linux and their userspace drivers are built into Mesa.
That history of greater compatibility matters in its own right: all of the developers of Linux desktop environments, window managers, and compositors have been running AMD or Intel GPUs almost exclusively for many years.
If "voting with your wallet" means anything to you, or you want things to "just work", AMD is the clear choice and it's not even close.
If you already have NVIDIA hardware, by all means, go ahead. It's doable. But AMD is a way more rational choice on Linux for most users.
I know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.
From people who have been using Linux since the 90s, the long term view is that nvidia has always been mostly fine since the early 2000s for hw acceleration if you didn't mind a binary blob. Yes, there have always been driver bugs - but that was never unique to a specific platform, i.e. nvidia on macos had opengl driver bugs that went unfixed for eternity until support was dropped, then the bug reports could be closed.
Comparatively the leading alternative was a dumpster fire of a broken mess for the longest time on Linux. All through the 2000s, ATi provided a binary blob driver known as fglrx which some people joked was a half-baked codebase from somemthing that started on HP-UX, passable enough for running sales demos and then was thrown at an intern to port it to Linux. If you went with ATi and tried to do much with foss opengl programs, you could expect daily or weekly kernel panics and performance that was <50% of that of the windows driver for an identical build. The solution was always to buy nvidia if you wanted stability.
Nothing has really changed for Nvidia on Linux, it still continues to perform adequetly. Plenty of people, including myself have used the binary blob for games and other 3D software with wine through the late 2000s, 2010s and proton in the 2020s without much comment because it works fine. The exception being that if you buy a used card, coming up on 10+ years old because your requirements are minimal - don't expect current driver support. Nvidia drop support for old cards on Windows too.
AMD is definitely night and day in terms of meeting the free software ecosystem properly, and so arguably the reason to go with a new AMD card is voting for that kind of support with your wallet.
There's so much "old info" that people pass around online when it comes to linux (or anything I guess with an ever evolving feature set).
Any modern distro running NVidia or AMD should be fine. I've done both. I didn't have to do anything for the NVIDIA 3000 or NVIDIA 4000 series cards but select the nvidia driver. AMD otoh is built into kernel now.
I run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck.
Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.
I bought AMD as my last GPU purely because it meant I didn't have to stress out about how I was actually going to acquire one. I just walked into Microcenter, picked one off the shelf, and checked out. It was the crypto craze then, and I get the impression that this hasn't changed much today with AI sucking all the oxygen out of consumer electronics. Didn't care very much about DLSS or any other Nvidia specific features. That AMD works well on Linux only sweetened the deal.
People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
Which card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
Anything between 700 and 2000 series (inclusive) is in this "completely proprietary due to signed firmware but also not fully supported in Wayland" zone. You need to have at least 3000 series to have proprietary drivers with open kernel driver and good KMS/GBM/Wayland support.
Nvidia on laptops is fine. There was a time that it was really difficult and the easiest route to success was to disable the Intel iGPU, and force Nvidia GPU to handle everything in BIOS. That hasn't been the case for a while, and you can even get nice desktop environment integration to let you choose which GPU to run a program with.
> Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
AMD for sure. Years ago for Linux NVIDIA was the sure winner. At the moment, AMD beats it out soundly on both cost and performance. ie, the same game running on either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in Linux will generally run much better on the AMD GPU.
I technically have both in one laptop with an AMD iGPU and an RTX GPU. Most of my problems with archlinux is running a 240Hz HDR monitor on dGPU, where the NVIDIA firmware glitches into buffer out of memory errors not reading the CDID properly, and this was solved only less than a month ago with latest beta driver. Lingering problem is waking from memory with crashed plasmashell but this one is KDE Plasma specific, while the monitor one is Linux wide.
Just anecdata, but I just got a Lenovo T16 with AMD. Graphics is just painless, everything works with no issues. My old system with an Nvidia card running the same O/S keeps running into weird issues. It mostly works, just needs attention and little tweaks and extra stuff sometimes.
For gaming and desktop use AMD is great, though for raytracing you'll need newer cards. If you want to run local AI models too then AMD is quite shaky, rocm only supports a few cards with each version and their software stack just isn't as polished as nvidia's.
AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
End of 2024 I did exactly that. Ryzen and RADEON all the way. Rocking Fedora right now but was using Ubuntu for a bit. I have no reason to use Windows at all.
Sure, if you're made of money. For the rest of us, AMD gives you more bang for your buck. Though in this market, it's hard to argue that any of them give you good value.
yes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.
In good faith, you can't really say "[x] is shit" if you don't have an usual setup; X11 is no longer the default on most distros. Even when I was also using it, it never crashed.
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2).
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
I sort of figured that HDMI stupidity was strategically a good thing as it sort of brought the dynamic of the HDMI consortium and VESA. specifically how they treat the end users, more to the public eye.
That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
I was faintly surprised that my recent monitor purchase came with a displayport cable.
Didn't help connecting it to my Macbook, but still..
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I didn't follow this story much: how exactly did they get past the legal hurdles? Or there never actually were any hurdles, just sabre rattling?
Purely rumor, but supposedly Valve put tons of pressure on them (no idea by what means, again this is all rumor) because they wanted support for the Steam Machine release.
any reason why we are using hdmi over display port?
Unless you're on the absolute newest stuff with DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DP1.4. That'll be Nvidias 2000 through 4000 series. No DisplayPort 2.1 until the RTX 5000s.
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
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The vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..
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Some people have TVs or displays that only use HDMI. I personally wouldn't recommend HDMI if DisplayPort is available, but if HDMI is your only option, then having it work properly will be important.
My monitor has 1 displayport and 2 hdmi and I have 2 computers I use with it. They can't share the displayport. All comparable monitors (last time I checked) have the same. So it'd be nice if both worked.
For one, DisplayPort doesn’t support HDR output
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AMD does a lot of work to ensure their support for Linux is first-class. With the kernel now natively supporting their systems, you can expect good support. It's earned them some good will over Nvidia which has gotten better recently with the rise of AI, but still requires users to jump through a couple of hoops due to their attempts to protect their IP.
It is more than that, I really like openbsd as a desktop system. This is niche enough that I have zero expectation for any sort of support from the hardware vendors. However, because the amd drivers are opensource. Heroic people in the obsd dev community are able to make it work there. I don't strictly need a gaming gpu for my desktop work, but it is nice to have a setup I can boot linux on to play games with.
Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
I built a Linux gaming PC a few years ago, running Bazzite.
AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
Nvidia makes a fine GPU. The problem with Nvidia on linux is the drivers. You're beholden to Team Green for driver updates, and when they decide not to support a GPU anymore, that's it. Now, linux does have the nouveau driver, but that doesn't support all the hardware or much 3d at all, and never will.
I particularly got fed up with Nvidia on linux playing War Thunder - I had a regular crash that Gaijin and Nvidia each blamed on each other, and I never did get it fixed.
Nvidia driver updates can also leave you stuck with no desktop environment on occasion and while fixable, it's a pain in the rear. However, when the drivers are right, Nvidia performance is second to none.
AMD has drivers built right into the kernel, and as long as you have whichever nonfree firmware repos your distro supports (I use Devuan, a Debian derivative), AMD cards 'just work'. If using xorg, install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu for modern cards, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon for older cards. I'm currently playing on a Radeon 9070 (non-XT) on a 1440p monitor with plenty of performance. I know that it also works on wayland, but I have no experience there.
open source nvidia is an area to keep an eye on. check out NVK and nova.
I think this gets overblown a bit. AMD is better, but Nvidia can work. There's plenty of valid reasons to put in the extra effort and go with Nvidia.
AMD began the process of open-sourcing their Linux graphics drivers more than 20 years ago. At that time, they had no working open-source drivers yet; they'd only just released some hardware documentation. I told myself then that if they came through and delivered open-source drivers, I was an AMD customer for life. I've more or less held to it. I don't remember the last time I considered NVIDIA an option.
NVIDIA has apparently open-sourced the kernel drivers for their most recent couple generations of graphics cards. That's great! But they have a hell of a lot of catching up to do. Their kernel drivers aren't in the mainline Linux kernel. Their userspace drivers are proprietary, whereas AMD's are open-source. AMD's kernel drivers are built into Linux and their userspace drivers are built into Mesa.
That history of greater compatibility matters in its own right: all of the developers of Linux desktop environments, window managers, and compositors have been running AMD or Intel GPUs almost exclusively for many years.
If "voting with your wallet" means anything to you, or you want things to "just work", AMD is the clear choice and it's not even close.
If you already have NVIDIA hardware, by all means, go ahead. It's doable. But AMD is a way more rational choice on Linux for most users.
I hope this is right, because "you have to use AMD GPU" is not what people want to hear when building a PC.
I know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.
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From people who have been using Linux since the 90s, the long term view is that nvidia has always been mostly fine since the early 2000s for hw acceleration if you didn't mind a binary blob. Yes, there have always been driver bugs - but that was never unique to a specific platform, i.e. nvidia on macos had opengl driver bugs that went unfixed for eternity until support was dropped, then the bug reports could be closed.
Comparatively the leading alternative was a dumpster fire of a broken mess for the longest time on Linux. All through the 2000s, ATi provided a binary blob driver known as fglrx which some people joked was a half-baked codebase from somemthing that started on HP-UX, passable enough for running sales demos and then was thrown at an intern to port it to Linux. If you went with ATi and tried to do much with foss opengl programs, you could expect daily or weekly kernel panics and performance that was <50% of that of the windows driver for an identical build. The solution was always to buy nvidia if you wanted stability.
Nothing has really changed for Nvidia on Linux, it still continues to perform adequetly. Plenty of people, including myself have used the binary blob for games and other 3D software with wine through the late 2000s, 2010s and proton in the 2020s without much comment because it works fine. The exception being that if you buy a used card, coming up on 10+ years old because your requirements are minimal - don't expect current driver support. Nvidia drop support for old cards on Windows too.
AMD is definitely night and day in terms of meeting the free software ecosystem properly, and so arguably the reason to go with a new AMD card is voting for that kind of support with your wallet.
There's so much "old info" that people pass around online when it comes to linux (or anything I guess with an ever evolving feature set).
Any modern distro running NVidia or AMD should be fine. I've done both. I didn't have to do anything for the NVIDIA 3000 or NVIDIA 4000 series cards but select the nvidia driver. AMD otoh is built into kernel now.
I run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck.
Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.
Right now AMD is the better choice due to support from Valve. It might change in the future due to Red Hat's effort.
AMD has provided great support for far longer, but newer Nvidia cards which support the nvidia-open driver should also be good.
Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.
I bought AMD as my last GPU purely because it meant I didn't have to stress out about how I was actually going to acquire one. I just walked into Microcenter, picked one off the shelf, and checked out. It was the crypto craze then, and I get the impression that this hasn't changed much today with AI sucking all the oxygen out of consumer electronics. Didn't care very much about DLSS or any other Nvidia specific features. That AMD works well on Linux only sweetened the deal.
People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
Which card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
I run a GTX 970 on Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland) without issues. Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.
Anything between 700 and 2000 series (inclusive) is in this "completely proprietary due to signed firmware but also not fully supported in Wayland" zone. You need to have at least 3000 series to have proprietary drivers with open kernel driver and good KMS/GBM/Wayland support.
I can't speak for the parent but I have a 5090 and it works perfectly fine
Nvidia on desktop has been mostly fine, if not rock solid, on the happy path they provide.
But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time.
Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
Nvidia on laptops is fine. There was a time that it was really difficult and the easiest route to success was to disable the Intel iGPU, and force Nvidia GPU to handle everything in BIOS. That hasn't been the case for a while, and you can even get nice desktop environment integration to let you choose which GPU to run a program with.
> Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
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AMD for sure. Years ago for Linux NVIDIA was the sure winner. At the moment, AMD beats it out soundly on both cost and performance. ie, the same game running on either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in Linux will generally run much better on the AMD GPU.
Either. If you want Nvidia features like DLSS then go with NVidia.
Def AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.
I technically have both in one laptop with an AMD iGPU and an RTX GPU. Most of my problems with archlinux is running a 240Hz HDR monitor on dGPU, where the NVIDIA firmware glitches into buffer out of memory errors not reading the CDID properly, and this was solved only less than a month ago with latest beta driver. Lingering problem is waking from memory with crashed plasmashell but this one is KDE Plasma specific, while the monitor one is Linux wide.
Just anecdata, but I just got a Lenovo T16 with AMD. Graphics is just painless, everything works with no issues. My old system with an Nvidia card running the same O/S keeps running into weird issues. It mostly works, just needs attention and little tweaks and extra stuff sometimes.
For gaming and desktop use AMD is great, though for raytracing you'll need newer cards. If you want to run local AI models too then AMD is quite shaky, rocm only supports a few cards with each version and their software stack just isn't as polished as nvidia's.
AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
End of 2024 I did exactly that. Ryzen and RADEON all the way. Rocking Fedora right now but was using Ubuntu for a bit. I have no reason to use Windows at all.
AFAIK none of AMD's offerings match the 5090 for pure gaming performance, so personally that's what I would stick with regardless.
Sure, if you're made of money. For the rest of us, AMD gives you more bang for your buck. Though in this market, it's hard to argue that any of them give you good value.
yes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.
yes
both are shit
I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit.
Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox
In good faith, you can't really say "[x] is shit" if you don't have an usual setup; X11 is no longer the default on most distros. Even when I was also using it, it never crashed.
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
Linux Mint uses X11 for some reason. I was getting black screen after sleep because of that. Nuked it and installed Ubuntu, worked fine.
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