so my old GPU died a few days ago and I was thinking which brand of GPU to get next. AMD or Nvidia? I’ve heard Nvidia drivers are very annoying with Linux but I’ve never had an AMD GPU before. Which would be better? I’ll sometimee switch to Windows to play specific games as well.

  • lloram239@feddit.de
    16·
    2 years ago

    I am on AMD, as I had too many problems with Nvidia over the years (e.g. driver borked after upgrade and stuck on console). That said, AMD driver ain’t of great quality these days either. Playing around with StableDiffusion and running out of VRAM will crash the driver and require a reboot. Some Xorg/kernel/driver versions crash frequently. One of my monitors does not work when connected over HDMI in Linux (flickering image), but works fine in Windows.

    AMD is also quite a bit more challenging with AI stuff in general, as everything is using Nvidia’s CUDA. The situation is however improving. On the positive side, AMD cards have more VRAM than equally priced Nvidia cards, which is far more important than raw performance in AI workloads (not having VRAM means you just can’t do some things).

    So not exactly smooth sailing, but AMD mostly works ok. For plain gaming via Proton I didn’t have any issues.

    • filister@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      How does it work for ML and AI tasks with AMD and their ROCm? I really despise Nvidia as a company but unfortunately when it comes to AI/ML and other productivity tasks AMD is just much inferior to Nvidia’s offering. Otherwise I would have definitely been very interested in the AMD 7900XTX, that has everything for pretty much half the price of 4090.

      • trougnouf@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        Install the ROCm version of packages and it mostly works (at least on Arch, and I assume Ubuntu since it has official packages from AMD.)

        • filister@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I am also using arch anyway, even though I am thinking of switching to Void now. I am just a bit worried about the “mostly” part. I was toying with the idea of getting 4060Ri with 16Gb of RAM, because of the VRAM. The other two cards are 4080 and 4090 I was considering but both are overpriced, especially the 4080.

      • ABeeinSpace@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        If it’s a ZOTAC card it might just click when the fans start and stop. My ZOTAC 3060 makes a click when the fans start and stop. It’s a good way to know when my PC wakes itself up lol