That’s the thing with AMD drivers, they’re the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you’d never know it’s there. It stays nicely out of the user’s way, you don’t even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
On one hand, setting up complicated stuff is a challenge and also fun.
On the other hand, I don’t wanna pay a company doing propreitery stuff.
On the other feet, prices are increasing due to chatbot girlfriend arms race between richest dudes on earth; are GPUs really even worth it anymore?
I think it’s more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
I’m running wayland with nvidia-open and nvidia-utils packages, and have never encountered any driver issues in both graphics and compute.
You mean all three apps that support waylamd are working? Wow. At the same time?
The only time I’ve ever really had issues with Nvidia drivers is when installing the meta package for CUDA (because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok), or with laptops and hybrid graphics.
But the laptop issue is almost completely gone with newer distros like Bazzite.
because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok
To be fair, this is a packaging/distro problem, as CUDA should always work (and be kept in sync with) the newest graphics driver.
ROCM and OpenVINO (AMD and Intel) are even more of a pain, actually.
Nvidia is such a night mare on Linux
When you want to do GPU processing for AI, crypto, video editing, etc, though, this gets reversed.
Getting Cuda working on Linux with an nvidia card is relatively painless. Just a few well-documented commands, worked on the first try.
I could never get AMD’s equivalent to work on Linux, though, and it led me down a horrible rabbit-hole of trying a dozen different driver versions from a dozen different places, all with their own unique and quirky ways of installing… And it still never did work.
Thats just poor distro support, kind of like CUDA in the past… ROCM should “just work” if it’s shipped right. But it’s not really a priority with maintainers.
Now, if you’re trying to run CUDA stuff with ROCM, that’s a whole different story. The bast majority of GPU software has extremely poor ROCM support compared to CUDA, and some of this is definitely from AMD footgunning.
ROCM still barely works on Windows and it’s only recently been supported at all IIRC.
ROCM is pretty simple. It’s just no where near as robust and supported as Cuda.
For me it was deadsimple once i tried setting it up with nix, granted you need to learn a little about nix so maybe that cancels it out a bit lol.
For me cuda was painful. I did the well documented commands, rebooted and had no output on my laptop screen anymore. Probably a complication due to Optimus, but still…
Intel drivers:
I need an intel driver to turn the fucking useless onboard graphics off. for debian. any tips?
In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn’t quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.
I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I’d always done them when LMDE6 was current.)
* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn’t modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don’t limit it.
AMD should make drivers for nVidia hardware. 🤷♂️
They’d probably work better than Nvidia’s
15 years ago this was true lol
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
The fps gap in games is still quite high with nvidia compared to windows, amd is almost on par now
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
From what I saw from my old room mate, it worked fine as of about 6 months ago. They got lower performance than on Windows, but still ran most games over 155fps (their monitor’s refresh rate) without any notable bugs. They had one of the cards that was like $2k new a year or two ago, idr the number, I think 4090?
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?
I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.
I think there are some that only install FOSS during initial installation
Like which ones?
I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
It used to be that there was no option at all, on any distro. You’d have the broken proprietary drivers, or the open source reverse engineered one with half the performance and unreliability in specialty features.
Since then Nvidia has shifted focus to get their drivers working properly, and there were also changes making them more open source, tho I’m not sure that’d mean the “proprietary driver” will go full foss at some point.
If op is to be believed, the proprietsry driver is already a lot more stable, so it’s now a software licensing issue not an unfixable technical issue.
Exactly!
Well, no, not at all. Nvida works on wayland on any distro, but it just works on some distros.
It just works means no user config required.
You might not remember ATI atrocity.
A decade ago it used to be opposite. How far Nvidia has fallen.
Considering their stock price has grown by 27,557% in those 10 years, I don’t think too many people at the company are concerned with their “falling”
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/NVDA/performance/total-return
It sucks that they abandoned us, and it’s awful that they’re a huge part of the AI bubble,. But, this is like an artist who used to play on Tuesday evenings at your local live music venues “selling out” and now playing stadiums.
i wish i could go to an amd card but i just upgraded my video card (geforce rtx 4060 ti) like 3 months before i decided to move to linux :(
Jo, no problem! Just use the proprietary drivers and vulcan, cuda etc. Just works
Especially with a recent card, like a 4060. Problematic are only the cards which are considered legacy by nvidia (I think older than the GTX 900 series), because they do not update their drivers for newer kernels. In these cases resorting to nouveau (in-kernel driver for nvidia cards) is your best bet, but you will not use the card’s full potential.
Edit: One can of course use proprietary drivers with legacy cards if you use a distro in a legacy kernel. But having old kernel then comes with less compatibility to other devices, as backports generally take their time.
yeah its not too bad i have the regular drivers and nvidia-smi shows the card using the gpu for most things; and jellyfin works great too.
i wish ff7 rebirth worked better but i think thats more of the game than a card.
What distro do you use, generally, there is a relatively easy way to switch to the nvidia proprietary ones, or what is “regular”in your case?
Last time I switched nvidia drivers after initial installation, I had to uninstall (lib32-)vulkan-nouveau (32bit and 64bit) and install (lib32-)nvidia-utils manually, but I guess, that may distro specific.
i’m on mint
➜ 11:11 katy ~ apt list --installed | grep "nvidia" libnvidia-cfg1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-common-580/noble-updates,noble-updates,noble-security,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 all [installed,automatic] libnvidia-compute-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-compute-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-decode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-decode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-egl-wayland1/noble-updates,now 1:1.1.13-1ubuntu0.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-egl-wayland1/noble-updates,now 1:1.1.13-1ubuntu0.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-encode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-encode-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-extra-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-fbc1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-fbc1-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-gl-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] libnvidia-gl-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 i386 [installed,automatic] nvidia-compute-utils-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-dkms-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-driver-550/noble-updates,noble-security,now 550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.2 amd64 [installed] nvidia-driver-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-firmware-550-550.144.03/noble-updates,noble-security,now 550.144.03-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed] nvidia-firmware-550-550.163.01/noble-updates,now 550.163.01-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed] nvidia-firmware-580-580.126.09/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-kernel-common-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-kernel-source-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-prime-applet/zena,zena,now 1.4.8 all [installed] nvidia-prime/noble,noble,now 0.8.17.2 all [installed,automatic] nvidia-settings/noble,now 510.47.03-0ubuntu4 amd64 [installed,automatic] nvidia-utils-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic] xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-580/noble-updates,noble-security,now 580.126.09-0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
Wait, does Nvidia actually update their drivers according to the latest Linux kernels?
😁yess
I did the same (different card but similar situation) and I was able to sell my Nvidia card for similar to what I paid for it. Not sure if that would be the case these days though.
I feel ya. I built pure AMD explicitly for linux gaming early last year… and then proceeded to not install linux for like 6 months 😅 had a 2080 ti for years before that
Intel be like that skeleton at the bottom underwater
I recall having fairly trouble free run with GF 1060 on Fedora on a desktop.
However having an AMD cpu and nvidia dgpu in a laptop is a fuckin’ nightmare. Probably only Broadcom and Mediatek are more random when it comes to drivers. Good thing is that you can plop out a wifi card and get an Intel one for €20.
Edit: I also run Amd 6800 and 9070 in 2 desktops and that just work. I never had to care for drivers.
Unless if you have the random HP laptop where no Intel card works.
(I have this laptop, there’s 2 ax200s that HP ships, one with Intel one with amd. No it’s not CNVIO)
I had that on some lenovo many many years ago… also lovely.
Luckily an EliteBook I got maybe 2 years ago allowed me to fix a bug in a wifi driver that mediatek introduced. There were workarounds, but fuck that. Ax200 fixed it.
this has not been my experience with AMD drivers…
