Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years! A bug is something which will be fixed.

Nvidias GPUs are theoretically fast on initial benchmarks. But that’s mostly optimization by others for Nvidia? That’s it.

Everything Nvidia has done is a pain. Closed-source drivers (old pain), out of tree-drivers (new pain), ignoring (or actively harming) Wayland (everyone handles implicit sync well, except Nvidia which required explicit sync[1]), and awkward driver bugs declared as “it is not a bug, it is a feature”. The infamous bug:

    This extension provides a    way for applications to discover when video
    memory content has been lost, so that the application can re-populate
    the video memory content as necessary.

This extension will be soon ten years old. At least they intend to fix it? They just didn’t in the past 9 years! Basically, video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume, VT-Switch and so on. The good news is, after years someone figured that out and implemented a workaround. For X11 with GNOME:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Ubuntu-2025-SnR

I hope in the meantime somebody implemented a patch for Wayland.

What we need? Reliability. And Linux support. That’s why I purchase AMD. And previously Intel.

[1] I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

AMD is not competing enough with NVIDIA, so they are not a solution.

What I mean is that whenever NVIDIA removed features from their "consumer" GPUs in order to reduce production costs and increase profits, AMD immediately followed them, instead of attempting to offer GPUs that have something that NVIDIA does not have.

Intel at least tries to be a real competitor, e.g. by offering much, much better FP64 performance or by offering more memory.

If Intel's discrete GPUs disappear, there will be no competition in consumer GPUs, as AMD tries to compete only in "datacenter" GPUs. I have ancient AMD GPUs that I cannot upgrade to newer AMD GPUs, because the newer GPUs are worse, not better (for computational applications; I do not care about games), while Intel offers acceptable substitutes, due to excellent performance per $.

Moreover, NVIDIA also had excellent Linux driver support for more than 2 decades, not only for games, but also for professional graphics applications (i.e. much better OpenGL support than AMD) and for GPU computing applications (i.e. CUDA). AMD gets bonus points for open-source drivers and much more complete documentation, but the quality of their drivers has been typically significantly worse.

NVIDIA always had good support even for FreeBSD, where I had to buy discrete NVIDIA GPU cards for computers with AMD APUs that were not supported for any other OS except Windows and Linux.

AMD "consumer" GPUs are a great choice for those who are interested only in games, but not for those interested in any other GPU applications. AMD "datacenter" GPUs are good, but they are far too expensive to be worthwhile for small businesses or for individuals.

I've found the amdgpu Linux driver to be fairly buggy running dual monitors with my Radeon VII, and found things like the fTPM to be highly buggy on Threadripper 2k/x399 to the point that I had to add a dTPM. They never got things truly working properly with those more-niche products before they just.. kind of... stopped working on them. And of course ROCm is widely regarded to be a mess.

On the other hand, my Steam Deck has been exceedingly stable.

So I guess I would say: Buy AMD but understand that they don't have the resources to truly support all of their hardware on any platform, so they have to prioritize.

> What we need? Reliability. And Linux support

Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too).

> I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

Maybe you should.

Buying AMD (for graphics) has been the only ethical choive for a long time. We must support the underdogs. Since regulation has flown the coop, we must take respondibility ourselves to fight monopolies. The short term costs may be a bit higher but the long term payoff is the only option for our self-interest!

/ steps down from soap box /

> Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers.

Funnily, AMD's in-tree drivers are kind of a pain in the ass. For up to a year after a new GPU is released, you have to deal with using mesa and kernel packages from outside your distro.. While if you buy a brand new nVidia card, you just install the latest release of the proprietary drivers and it'll work.

Linux's driver model really is not kind to new hardware releases.

Of course, I still buy AMD because Nvidia's drivers really aren't very good. But that first half a year was not pleasant last time I got a relatively recently released (as in, released half a year earlier) AMD card.

> Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years!

Linux support has been excellent on AMD for less than 15 years though. It got really good around 10 years ago, not before.

Agreed! This is great news for AMD and users.

Those who want to run Linux seriously will buy AMD. Intel will be slowly phased out, and this will reduce maintenance and increase the quality of anything that previously had to support both Intel and AMD.

However, if Microsoft or Apple scoop up AMD, all hell will break loose. I don’t think either would have interest in Linux support.

Oh boy that strikes a nerve with the "Video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume". Countless hours lost trying to fix a combination of drivers and systemd hooks for my laptop to be able to suspend/hibernate and wake up back again without issues... Which makes it even more complicated when using Wayland.

I have been looking at high-end laptops with dedicated AMD Graphics chip, but can't find many... So I will probably go with AMD+NVidia with MUX switch, let's see how it goes... Unless someone else has other suggestions?

> Basically, video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume, VT-Switch and so on.

This actually makes sense: for example, a new task has swapped out previous task's data, or host and guest are sharing the GPU and pushing each others data away. I don't understand why this is not a part of GPU-related standards.

As for solution, discarding all the GPU data after resume won't help? Or keeping the data in the system RAM.

Last I tried to file a bug for a crash in an AMD Windows driver I had to through an anonymous developer I found on Discord, and despite weeks of efforts writing and sharing test case they choose to ignore the bug report I the end. The developer even asked not to be named as he might face repercussions for trying to help out.

Excellent Linux support. Except for ROCm which is a big mess.

I once had an mini pc with Nvidia. I got it for Cuda dev. One day the support for it was dropped for it so I was unable to update my system without it messing things up. So regardless of Cuda I decided Nvidia is not for me.

However, doing research when buying a new pc, I've found that AMD kind of sucks too. ROCm isn't even supported on many of the systems i was looking into. Also, I've heard their Linux graphics drivers are poor.

So basically I just rock a potato with Intel integrated graphics now. GPUs cost too much to deal with that nonsense.

FWIW, my experience gaming/web browsing/coding on a 3070 with modern drivers has been fine. Mutter and KWin both have very good Wayland sessions if you're running the new (>550-series) drivers.