Comment by Gigachad
1 day ago
My experience has been that for Linux you are always better buying older mid tier hardware because all of the issues and optimisations have already been worked out and those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates.
> those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates
Unless you insist on running a server distro that's consistently obsolete by design (and if the notion of GPU comes into picture, that definitely shouldn't be the case), it shouldn't matter in practice. Every reputable desktop distro has a kernel/mesa stack that's up to date.
It still takes a few years for other people to find and patch the bugs.
~3 year old hardware seems to be optimal for linux in my experience. Ideally a thinkpad or something lots of linux devs have.
Buy newer and you'll be constantly finding bugs and having to apply workarounds, custom kernel builds, custom config lines, etc. just to make basic features work like the ability to adjust screen brightness.
Don't buy anything ARM or requiring a custom bootloader - thats a constant battle with custom builds needed of nearly everything.
Yes, but the debugging process is the most fun part for me.
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I would also add don't use an LTS variant (or anything based on an LTS variant) of those desktop distros
I've switched my gaming PC last year to Linux and it's been flawless.
Originally ran a 3070 which matches your "older mid tier" description and then upgraded to a 9070XT maybe 6 months after launch so not so old or mid-tier.
This used to be the case, but new AMD cards were fine about 2 weeks after they released, provided you’re not on an old kernel of course.
I can attest to this myself, my 9070 was a bit rough on launch but worked perfectly soon after.
I would say my 9070XT works better in Linux than it does in Windows.
I actually switched off Windows in a last-ditch attempt to get Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to stop crashing. To my surprise, it worked.
Never going back to Windows.
I can't launch Doom 2016, Brothers or Darksiders 2 on Windows. The screen blanks, if I unplug the HDMI cable and plug it in again I do sometimes get a signal. Ofcourse it works flawless under Linux.
Who would've thought that in 2026 gaming under Linux is actually the better option. Pretty awesome to see it work so well!
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I bought a 9070 xt shortly after launch and it was already fine, but I am on arch so had easy access to latest kernel.
Fine is not good enough. New amd cards need a year. Is raytracing fully working (min 90% of the win11 performance) these days?
Yes, raytracing works and it’s performant. I don’t know about 90% of Windows 11 performance but I am too busy enjoying games to care about benchmarks.
Just to put things into perspective, the 9070XT is the third or fourth fastest gaming graphics card money can buy depending on the game.
The 5070Ti is $300 more than the 9070XT with similar performance, the 5080 could give you a good boost but costs even more, then you’ve got the 5090 which is a completely insane and unrealistically expensive purchase.
The 5070ti used to be more closely priced against the 9070XT but the RAM crisis is driving Nvidia card costs up faster than AMD due to the difference in RAM type.
When you think about it in that context I have to ask if it even matters that the raytracing on this card in Linux is competitive when the Nvidia side gives you a lower tier card for the same dollar anyway.
Nvidia typically has more of a performance penalty in Linux than AMD as well, so that narrows the gap further.
This idea that it must have wonderfully perfect raytracing performance has to be put in this perspective. The reality is that even if raytracing is half as fast in Linux as it is in Windows you’re still raytracing much faster than the median gamer on the market. A game that runs poorly on a 9070XT doesn’t exist.
There are also still in 2026 very few games that extensively leverage raytracing and path tracing since the PlayStation and Xbox game consoles are limited in that regard. It makes very little sense for most game developers to make their games only come out looking nice with path tracing cranked up.
Ubuntu LTS distros can need some time, yeah. A few months is not unheard of.
AMD typically starts adding basic kernel support before the hardware comes out, but full feature support is usually shipped shortly after hardware release. I suppose it's to avoid leaking specs before release?
But anyway if you want good support for new hardware, much better to run some sort of rolling release, like most Arch based distros.
Personally I run an Ubuntu LTS but with the latest mesa drivers via ppa, and am always at least a generation behind on the card. Much cheaper that way. Or at least it used to be...
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So I can't comment on the raytraced experience because I don't bother with the raytracing, however I found AND worked out of the box on day one multiple times now. However RT benchmarks from January show it neck and neck.
https://www.techspot.com/news/110999-new-benchmarks-show-lin...
With significant improvements still incoming.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/even-more-amd-ray-trac...
> New amd cards need a year.
Not in my experience. The 16GB 9070 non-XT seems to have been released in March 2025. I purchased one in November 2025 [0]. I observed -and continue to observe- no significant difference in graphics performance between Linux and Windows. I've also not noticed any significant difference in performance with regards to raytracing, but that might be because I have the non-XT variant, and/or it might be because I run Gentoo Linux, which probably has much newer versions of both Mesa and the kernel than most Linux distributions. I CBA to test either of these theories.
[0] Mad props to Gamers Nexus for publishing the video where they speculated that the time around Thanksgiving was going to be the "low" point for graphics card prices... so if you were thinking of buying an upgrade that was THE time to do so. They were totally correct.
i have used linux for 20 years now. I'm actually so happy we get good working drivers mere weeks after new hardware launch.
I switched to Bazzite about 3 weeks ago and am amazed at how well everything "just works". Steam and Battlenet games all running. Nvidia 5070, AMD Rizen 7800x3d, recent gigabyte motherboard.