Hey everyone,
I’m currently rocking a 3080 I bought second hand in my Arch Linux rig. It works great under xorg but not so much wayland. There are a number of bugs and gaming performance is worse. I would like to use wayland in general for the mixed refresh rates with dual monitors. My question is: Is AMD really that much better than Nvidia? Is the AMD experience issue free with wayland? Also, how is hardware encoding with AMD? I’m particularly curious how performance is for game streaming with sunshine. I currently use nvenc hardware encoding which is amazing and feels like there is no latency. Does AMD have a similar experience?
Thanks!
You can’t really use Wayland with Nvidia. Whether it’ll ever be possible will be up to Nvidia…if they release open source drivers, then it will. Otherwise, no chance. I have a 3080 and use Manjaro XFCE. Gaming is nearly flawless. But it’s not Wayland.
Couldn’t judge sunshine etc. as I don’t stream.
Generally, I’d say you’ll do much better with AMD on Linux, if you don’t rely on Nvidia specific features.
I use Wayland KDE daily with Nvidia. It’s not the most polished experience but it’s far from ‘no chance’. The only problems I’ve experienced are YouTube download gui not working, task bar randomly freezing (which isn’t an Nvidia specific issue according to the kde issue tracker comments), visual glitches on kde panels with blurred backgrounds and the computer not waking up from sleep (didn’t try troubleshooting or running x so might be solvable).
Edit: Remembered more things unrelated to Wayland but might be related to Nvidia. Kde system monitor reads all nvidia gpu data as 0 even though it shows up correctly in nvtop. And all ttys except the default are outputed from the igpu which makes troubleshooting annoying.
It’s more of “NVIDIA bad” than “AMD good”. AMD does what is expected in the Linux world, to make open source drivers that are part of the Mesa project. That shouldn’t be an amazing feat of awesomeness, that should just be standard procedure. However, when the competition is so horrifically bad at drivers on Linux, following the standard makes AMD look amazing. For what it’s worth, I have an Intel Arc A770 on my Linux setup and it works great. Intel also follows the standard procedure of making their drivers open and part of the Mesa project. However, AMD has been in the graphics card (and driver) game for much longer and their drivers have a lot more optimization, plus Valve has put work into making AMD’s drivers better for gaming workloads over the past several years (especially given the Steam Deck runs an AMD GPU). Hopefully Intel gets more performance parity with AMD in the Linux driver world as time goes on. It’s definitely gotten much better since launch already.
As for NVIDIA, maybe NVK can make them even sort of useful without the nasty proprietary drivers but reverse engineered drivers are always going to take longer to get anywhere near the same performance of ones written based on actual official documentation.
When i had Nvidia, i had to install the latest driver always manually, booting RL3 in console and install the new driver “by hand”. Under the bottom, i was happy with my Nvidia card, but i switched to AMD not even a year ago. Since then, “it just works” :)
Is AMD really that much better?
As someone who swapped out their RTX 3060 for an RX 6900 XT, yes, yes it is. Everything. Just. Works. Display sync, high refresh rate, Wayland, Source games (yeah some native source games just won’t play nice on NVIDIA randomly, lmao), driver installation (or lack thereof). It’s just a WAY better experience, especially not having to track down and install NVIDIA’s drivers. Seriously, you don’t realize how much of a convoluted (and frustratingly distro-specific) process it is until you switch to AMD.
NVIDIA will play nice if you put in ALL the work it needs to behave, X11, proprietary drivers, etc. Don’t play by its rules? Then Jensen Huang himself put a pipe bomb under your pillow. If you don’t mind catering your setup to NVIDIA, then you won’t really notice a difference. I mean, in all fairness I now cater my hardware to Linux, buying only AMD/Intel GPUs, so I can’t judge.
