this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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I tried Linux on my desktop end of last year (like I always did on about a yearly basis) and decided that if I was gonna make the switch, I needed an AMD card. NVIDIA + Wayland had a lot of flickering issues and whatnot, but I didn't want to use X11 because Wayland has way better support for multi-monitor with different refresh rates and also VRR.
So, I sold my RTX 3080 and got a Radeon 7800 XT and switched to Linux on my main desktop full-time January 1st. A few months later and NVIDIA finally decides to stop fucking around and properly improve their Linux driver. Could've saved a few bucks there (sold the 3080 for like 350,-€ to a friend and got the 7800 XT for like 550,-€, and the 7800 XT is pretty much in the same performance ballpark, so I spent 200,-€ on better compatibility/less pain).
Good to know that NVIDIA will be an option for me for a GPU upgrade in the future. It's always good to have more choice. While my experience with AMD Radeon under Linux was okay, it wasn't really perfect either. I had the odd crash here and there with kernel versions from earlier in the year (6.6), 6.7 had black screen issues with RDNA3 (maybe RDNA2 as well) after standby and hot restarts (fixed in 6.7.4 or 6.7.5 iirc), and ever since 6.7 I have stability issues with enabled VRR and multi-monitor as well, unless I force the memory clock to stay at a higher frequency. Then there's also this issue that just got fixed with 6.10 it seems.
So if NVIDIA really ups their game now and consistently improves their Linux driver, I could see myself going NVIDIA again. I'm also excited to see what Intel has in store though.
Honestly don’t feel too bad. I JUST tried switching full time to Debian bookworm with a 3070ti and I had the EXACT problems you describe. I tried built in drivers. Debian Nvidia drivers. Nvidia drivers straight from Nvidia, nothing would work. Was getting like 60 fps in overwatch and it would dip to 20 frames constantly. It was unplayable. I couldn’t even get my 4 monitors connected at one time no matter what I tried. Ended up going back to windows 11 with the decrappifier unattend file. Back to 170 frames easy. I am convinced the only way to dodge this is with an AMD card. My next computer will be AMD graphics for sure so I can finally switch for good. Sorry about the long rant but I was so frustrated with it! Don’t ever doubt yourself and swapping to the AMD card! Lol.
I'm not regretting the switch, no worries :). Overall the Radeon 7800 XT is still a great card, it's a decent step up in terms of efficiency compared to the RTX 3080 as well and the PowerColor Hellhound model I got is the first card I ever had (well, with active cooling at least) where I actually agree with the reviews that the card stays pretty quiet even under load.
I also know how to work around each problem: KDE has a built-in workaround for the cursor stutters (as of version 6.something) and in GNOME you can disable hardware cursor which can decrease performance, but so far I haven't really noticed anything. The artifacting and eventual crashing after standby with enabled VRR can be worked around by reconfiguring any display: I usually change the refresh rate of my second display between 144 and 165 hertz. The frequency of random crashes decreased a lot with newer kernel versions, and I'm not even sure if the crashes I had in KDE 6/6.1 were caused by the AMD driver or by KDE - which seems quite a bit more moody to me than the more mature KDE 5. That's also why I'm trying GNOME now (which I actually enjoy using way more than I thought). A few days ago AV1 decoding on AMD was borked in Mesa 24.1.something, but was hotfixed a few days later. My self-compiled kernel 6.10 refused to boot with errors related to a network card, but I'll check it out again as soon as Fedora releases their official test build (potentially this weekend) and will report the bug should it still occur. As soon as 6.10 is working, that's one less workaround for me to worry about (unless that fix somehow doesn't work for me).
My comment was more about the fact that I'm happy NVIDIA starts taking Linux serious (again). It's probably not quite there yet, but NVIDIA seems to be committed to delivering a good Linux driver now and their latest releases each brought big improvements. There still seem to be some bigger issues (like the one you described), but now I'd assume we'll get there sooner rather than later.
I also have a 3080 and have been considering switching to AMD, but with the problems you describe. Maybe, I'll give Intel's offerings a shot assuming the graphics cards don't suffer the same way their cpu's are right now.
I have an Intel Arc A750 lying around that I used at the end of last year to test whether a specific problem I was having under Linux was related to NVIDIA or something else. The answer was NVIDIA basically all of the time, but keep in mind this was around the 535 driver version.
I didn't really test the Intel GPU long enough to tell you whether I'd recommend it. It worked well out of the box, but I'm not sure whether some of the game compatibility problems under Windows mirror over to Linux.
What was very cool when I was A-B testing some of the issues I had with the AMD card though, is that you can simply shut down the computer, swap the cards and it'll boot up just fine right away. No driver installs needed as the kernel just includes it - no driver conflicts either. With NVIDIA, the driver can have conflicts when using a card by a different vendor.
Also, so far the flicker/crash issue I had under KDE didn't happen under GNOME (with experimental VRR enabled). It's too early to tell (only about a week into using GNOME), but this issue might not occur under GNOME. It's kind of hard to pinpoint what the issue is related to anyway (kernel, firmware, Wayland, KDE/desktop environment, etc.).
I reported the issue here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3268 and pinpointed it to weird fluctuations with the memory frequency. Just workaround so far though, no fix.