Maybe it's stockholm syndrome but I still have no interest in Linux. Are nvidia drivers still bad?

chuckadams 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The driver situation on Linux is still pretty hit-or-miss, but thanks to Microsoft's recent efforts, Windows has reached the same level of reliability as well.

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jabroni_salad 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on why they are bad.

If they're bad because they are proprietary, it is what it is. If they're bad because their dx12 performance is worse on linux than windows, supposedly the fixes for the vulkan descriptor boogeyman problem are just around the corner.

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forbiddenlake 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do you mean by bad?

Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.

Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.

Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.

	▲	keyringlight 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement. Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
	▲	bee_rider 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.
	▲	parineum 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source. That's a decent enough reason for a linux user to buy an AMD GPU but it isn't a good reason not switch to linux from a closed source OS. I'm in the process of switching to linux full time (it shouldn't really take that long but I haven't had a solid chunk of time in a bit) and am using an NVidia GPU so I went from closed source windows drivers to closed source linux drivers. You're the top comment that addresses this so I'm putting this here but not exactly replying to you.

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marginalia_nu 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Haven't really ever had much issues with nvidia drivers on Linux tbh, and I've been using it since the early 2000s.

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nusl 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Drivers are generally fine, but there's more to it than just switching. If you're not bothered by the Win11 stuff, switching is probably not for you. Perhaps you can look into Linux for your current use cases and see if it's at all attractive.

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bobsterlobster 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The nvidia gods smile upon me, zero issues except the one I mentioned in the article. They do have to fix VKD3D performance though, 10-30% perf loss on Intel/Nvidia hardware when playing DX12 games.

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baby_souffle 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Are nvidia drivers still bad?

Depends a ton hardware. Newer hardware has been playing well with the kernel but still not fully oss.

You’ll still have less trouble over all with amd though.

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aeroevan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

nvidia drivers are pretty easy to install now that all of AI is trained on nvidia drivers on linux