I haven't gamed on linux in about 2 years, but these results do not surprise me one bit. "AMD good, NVIDIA bad" has always been a meme in the Linux community, largely because NVIDIA's historical...
I haven't gamed on linux in about 2 years, but these results do not surprise me one bit.
"AMD good, NVIDIA bad" has always been a meme in the Linux community, largely because NVIDIA's historical decision to keep their drivers proprietary does not play nice with the kernel's lack of a stable binary driver interface. This means that kernel updates have a tendency to break your desktop. There are mechanisms to prevent this problem, and they generally work these days on major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, but the headache has never really gone away in my experience.
However, reality is always more complicated than the memes suggest. And while NVIDIA on Linux is far from perfect, my experience has always been that NVIDIA is more reliable and performant than AMD once the proprietary driver is up and running as intended.
I don’t really think ray tracing performance is a great comparison on the whole, it’s not surprising that AMD is behind here. I have had driver issues with AMD in the past on Linux, but I honestly...
I don’t really think ray tracing performance is a great comparison on the whole, it’s not surprising that AMD is behind here.
I have had driver issues with AMD in the past on Linux, but I honestly haven’t had any issues whatsoever on the newest generation of cards and the performance has been great.
The big thing that pushes AMD ahead on Linux is who is contributing to it. Not only AMD is working on AMDVLK but Valve and others are working on radv as well. There is a lot more interest in getting driver fixes in for various games on Linux quickly versus Nvidia where you get what you get when they get around to rebasing their Linux drivers. For a recent example, IIRC it took Starfield a couple months to be playable on Linux w/ Nvidia cards but it was a lot quicker on the Windows side of things.
CUDA drivers are released slower and after much more diligence and testing than the “bleeding edge” gaming drivers. However, without gamers hitting every bump in the road, the CUDA drivers...
CUDA drivers are released slower and after much more diligence and testing than the “bleeding edge” gaming drivers. However, without gamers hitting every bump in the road, the CUDA drivers wouldn’t be as good.
I feel like that actually is a recent change. If I am not mistaken, AMD only did start making their drivers open source around 2015 and this is also where you start seeing a lot of improvements....
"AMD good, NVIDIA bad" has always been a meme in the Linux community
I feel like that actually is a recent change. If I am not mistaken, AMD only did start making their drivers open source around 2015 and this is also where you start seeing a lot of improvements.
Before that, the closed source Nvidia drivers did often do better than the AMD ones as far as update cadence went, etc. Going back even a bit further (2000s) I am pretty sure the standard advice was Nvidia if you wanted "good" 3d graphics support.
The NV linux proprietary drivers always were pretty good performance-wise, but if you run a bleeding edge distro, they are a hassle. And I never saw the point of supporting a company that makes my...
The NV linux proprietary drivers always were pretty good performance-wise, but if you run a bleeding edge distro, they are a hassle.
And I never saw the point of supporting a company that makes my experience a hassle (unless I need something only they got -like cuda-). Especially in comparison to the great open-source driver-experience AMD provides.
There's nothing really insightful here. It just confirms what we already know: radeon has crap raytracing performance and great rasterization. That performance is largely operating system...
There's nothing really insightful here. It just confirms what we already know: radeon has crap raytracing performance and great rasterization. That performance is largely operating system independent and is just a manifestation of the differences in hardware. It also explains the huge gap in Nvidia vs Radeon card prices.
I haven't gamed on linux in about 2 years, but these results do not surprise me one bit.
"AMD good, NVIDIA bad" has always been a meme in the Linux community, largely because NVIDIA's historical decision to keep their drivers proprietary does not play nice with the kernel's lack of a stable binary driver interface. This means that kernel updates have a tendency to break your desktop. There are mechanisms to prevent this problem, and they generally work these days on major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, but the headache has never really gone away in my experience.
However, reality is always more complicated than the memes suggest. And while NVIDIA on Linux is far from perfect, my experience has always been that NVIDIA is more reliable and performant than AMD once the proprietary driver is up and running as intended.
I don’t really think ray tracing performance is a great comparison on the whole, it’s not surprising that AMD is behind here.
I have had driver issues with AMD in the past on Linux, but I honestly haven’t had any issues whatsoever on the newest generation of cards and the performance has been great.
The big thing that pushes AMD ahead on Linux is who is contributing to it. Not only AMD is working on AMDVLK but Valve and others are working on radv as well. There is a lot more interest in getting driver fixes in for various games on Linux quickly versus Nvidia where you get what you get when they get around to rebasing their Linux drivers. For a recent example, IIRC it took Starfield a couple months to be playable on Linux w/ Nvidia cards but it was a lot quicker on the Windows side of things.
Of course. Millions of computers run the proprietary Nvidia Linux driver for CUDA. It can’t be terrible.
CUDA drivers are released slower and after much more diligence and testing than the “bleeding edge” gaming drivers. However, without gamers hitting every bump in the road, the CUDA drivers wouldn’t be as good.
I feel like that actually is a recent change. If I am not mistaken, AMD only did start making their drivers open source around 2015 and this is also where you start seeing a lot of improvements.
Before that, the closed source Nvidia drivers did often do better than the AMD ones as far as update cadence went, etc. Going back even a bit further (2000s) I am pretty sure the standard advice was Nvidia if you wanted "good" 3d graphics support.
The NV linux proprietary drivers always were pretty good performance-wise, but if you run a bleeding edge distro, they are a hassle.
And I never saw the point of supporting a company that makes my experience a hassle (unless I need something only they got -like cuda-). Especially in comparison to the great open-source driver-experience AMD provides.
There's nothing really insightful here. It just confirms what we already know: radeon has crap raytracing performance and great rasterization. That performance is largely operating system independent and is just a manifestation of the differences in hardware. It also explains the huge gap in Nvidia vs Radeon card prices.