Choice of graphics card

[nvaert1986]

Hello everyone,

I've been looking into a new graphics card and I'm curious what other people are using for gaming and why. It's not my intention to start a flame war, but I'm looking for a new card as I currently have 1 AMD RDNA2 and 1 RDNA3 cards and have mixed feelings about it, due to all sorts of issues and bugs I'm facing. Why do people hate NVIDIA so much, but love AMD so much? Do other people have different experiences with AMD?. How's gaming using an Intel Arc card for example?

I currently have 1 RDNA2 and 1 RDNA3 cards and use them on an Intel 12th gen and AMD Ryzen 7000 series system (tried various BIOS releases throughout the years) and it's not completely to my satisfaction due to quite a number of reasons / issues:

- (AMD Ryzen system only) While booting my system sometimes gives a delayed display (the display will not appear until 5 - 10 seconds POST). When this happens my system is guaranteed not to load the graphical interface (neither X or Wayland) it just hangs and sits there wit a cursor no idea why. A reboot doesn't help either. What helps is shutting the system down and unplugging, waiting 30 seconds and plugging the power back in again
- (AMD Ryzen system only) While cold booting my system (after a power off, not after a PSU replug action as described above) just hangs while initializing the amdgpu DRM on a loading screen and freezes there. This has been already going on for a year on the 6.6 kernel. After a reboot it works without an issue and can play games for hours.
- While playing certain games (and only certain games) the amdgpu module will go black out of nowhere and throw an error in the form of "[drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=xxxx, emitted seq=xxxx" and try to reset itself (failing miserably as the system usually just hangs indefinitely, sometimes I can reboot. This occurred especially with kernels 6.7 - 6.9
- Kernel 6.10.11 seems to be the most stable kernel so far. It hangs (rarely) during a cold boot (usually 1/10 times), but I'm always able to play games for hours and run the system for hours without any issues.
- Kernel 6.10.14 is having issues where it just randomly freezes completely after a while
- Kernel 6.11.x is not booting at all (tried several versions). It hard freezes while loading the amdgpu (even numlock is not responding) and have to hard reset. After this hard reset issue 1 with the POST is guaranteed to be triggered as well.
- The last I tried was git-sources-6.12-rc6 a few weeks ago, which seemed to boot, but didn't do any thorough testing on it
- A laptop with an amdgpu was tested with kernels 6.1 - 6.12 and would always just freeze randomly in the graphical interface and artifact (works fine with Microsoft Windows 10).

All of the above was tested with different mesa versions from 24.0.x to 24.2.x and this didn't really seem to affect the performance or stability in any way.

As you can see I've faced quite a few challenges with AMD based graphics cards in several system (that while the amdgpu driver is open source and should be more stable; at least that's what I frequently read). That while my last system had an MSI (NVIDIA) Geforce 1070 (on a Ryzen 2000 series system) which I've used (with X.org, as Wayland always gave a lot of trouble with older NVIDIA drivers) without any major issues on my former system at all. It was rock solid and I never faced any kernel crashes or weird bugs like I'm facing with AMD based cards (I had some minor issues, but they were usually resolved in 1 or 2 driver releases later).
How's this experience in regards with the current generation of cards (4000 series)?

The same is true (in my opion), when it comes to support. Whenever I faced an issue with an NVIDIA card. I'd report it on their respective forums. Added an nvidia-bug-report using their tool and it would usually be resolved 1 - 2 releases later after some communication and testing. Whenever I faced an issues with an AMD card and reported a kernel bug / drm / mesa bug on GitLab and they usually ask me a few questions and then to bi-sect the issue myself. Now I know quite a lot but I'm still in the process of learning on fully how to bi-sect. I understand that the resources (time and amount) of developers is scarse and they need to focus their attention on a lot of cases, but if you'd ask that to an end user the NVIDIA experience is a lot friendlier than the AMD experience (not to be negative towards the developers; I understand the pressure and choices that need to be made; I work in IT; again, that's my opinion).
How's this experience with Intel based mesa drivers?

So as an alternative I was looking for my current AMD RNDA based cards to be replaced by an NVIDIA one (as there's no semi- open source base drivers) or perhaps Intel. How is the performance of the current Intel Arc A770 on Linux with regards to gaming.
Does it hold up like in Windows with more recent mesa versions in regards to performance and stability? Are all games playable? (I'd wait for the BattleMage release in this case , which should come soon)

I've also tested several Intel based laptops (or Intel / NVIDIA hybrid) based laptops and never faced any issues with the DRM subsystem, graphical glitches or whatsover, which I have with AMD (though primarily desktop use cases)

I'm curious about the thoughts of other members of the Phoronix community, so please let me know :-)

[Panix]

Imho, the best thing for you to do is three-fold: 1) read the forums - in this section for ppl talking about their amd gpus - you will get a lot of opinions but I think most ppl here swear by amd gpus - for Linux gaming as well. 2) wait for specific replies. 3) Sell the older RDNA 2 card and buy an nvidia gpu. You won't know what's different or have a good idea until you try a nvidia card.

If someone recognizes and understands what you are talking about - and/or they have experienced the same thing - they can either relate or can assist you in what to do to fix it or workarounds.

If I had two PCs - I'd have one system with an amd gpu and 1 with an nvidia - just so I could compare but also, I am sure the experience would be different with them simply because of the 2 gpus.

I could be mistaken but I'm not sure the Intel cpu vs AMD ryzen cpu difference will be significant - at least for gaming experience - the Intel 13th gen was an improvement but the nvidia proprietary/wayland setup will probably still be quite different than using AMD's FOSS amdgpu setup. But, you won't know if you prefer one over the other or whether the experience is preferable with one until you configure one of the PCs with an nvidia gpu - I would try to get one closest to the amd gpu tier, though - so, it's a more fair comparison.

[Melcar]

I thought I was the only one getting random black screens and display signal interruptions. Been having that issue since my RX480 (with FX8320 and Ryzen 1700) and now a RX6750XT (with Ryzen 5800X). Does not happen regularly and only once in a blue moon, so I learned to just live with it, but it is frustrating. Also for some reason my setup just refuses to work at all with DP 1.2 for some odd reason (have to switch my monitor to DP 1.1), but that could be my aging monitor.

Other than that, my experience with AMD GPUs has been satisfactory with what I do 90% of the time (games from old DX5 to newer DX12/Vulkan titles, internet, movie streaming and local playback, some work with Windows VMs). I don't even bother with the proprietary driver (maybe the above problems would be resolved if I did but who knows). The only nvidia cards I have are older models like legacy 700 series, and for those I just can't be bothered to get the proprietary drivers to work with Wayland and secure boot (and nouveau is unusable). Maybe current nvidia cards are better now with the new nvidia kernel module.

Have not tried Intel cards. From reviews it seems the A770 lands somewhere around RX7600XT performance (in Windows at least) and the current asking price is not bad. New Intel cards are said to come out soon, so it may be wise to wait a bit.

[nvaert1986]

Imho, the best thing for you to do is three-fold: 1) read the forums - in this section for ppl talking about their amd gpus - you will get a lot of opinions but I think most ppl here swear by amd gpus - for Linux gaming as well. 2) wait for specific replies. 3) Sell the older RDNA 2 card and buy an nvidia gpu. You won't know what's different or have a good idea until you try a nvidia card.

If someone recognizes and understands what you are talking about - and/or they have experienced the same thing - they can either relate or can assist you in what to do to fix it or workarounds.

If I had two PCs - I'd have one system with an amd gpu and 1 with an nvidia - just so I could compare but also, I am sure the experience would be different with them simply because of the 2 gpus.

I could be mistaken but I'm not sure the Intel cpu vs AMD ryzen cpu difference will be significant - at least for gaming experience - the Intel 13th gen was an improvement but the nvidia proprietary/wayland setup will probably still be quite different than using AMD's FOSS amdgpu setup. But, you won't know if you prefer one over the other or whether the experience is preferable with one until you configure one of the PCs with an nvidia gpu - I would try to get one closest to the amd gpu tier, though - so, it's a more fair comparison.

I used a NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti in the past. This was rock solid in my experience. I'll try getting newer / cheap NVIDIA card (as they seem to be extremely expensive and I'm open to any brand as long as the quality is good and it's stable, that's why I asked the question regarding the Intel based cards), to see what it does.
I'm using both an Intel 12th gen CPU and a AMD Ryzen series and this does not affect anything (aside from the kernel configuration) related to gaming. I consider both of them to be stablem.

My experience with configuring an NVIDIA GPU on Linux is relatively easy. Just install the nvidia-drivers package suppported by the GPU, reboot and done (and make sure you're using a supported kernel. I always tend to stick with the LTS kernels).

[nvaert1986]

I thought I was the only one getting random black screens and display signal interruptions. Been having that issue since my RX480 (with FX8320 and Ryzen 1700) and now a RX6750XT (with Ryzen 5800X). Does not happen regularly and only once in a blue moon, so I learned to just live with it, but it is frustrating. Also for some reason my setup just refuses to work at all with DP 1.2 for some odd reason (have to switch my monitor to DP 1.1), but that could be my aging monitor.

Other than that, my experience with AMD GPUs has been satisfactory with what I do 90% of the time (games from old DX5 to newer DX12/Vulkan titles, internet, movie streaming and local playback, some work with Windows VMs). I don't even bother with the proprietary driver (maybe the above problems would be resolved if I did but who knows). The only nvidia cards I have are older models like legacy 700 series, and for those I just can't be bothered to get the proprietary drivers to work with Wayland and secure boot (and nouveau is unusable). Maybe current nvidia cards are better now with the new nvidia kernel module.

Have not tried Intel cards. From reviews it seems the A770 lands somewhere around RX7600XT performance (in Windows at least) and the current asking price is not bad. New Intel cards are said to come out soon, so it may be wise to wait a bit.

For me this happens every 3 - 4 cold boots (power-off and power-on of the system; not unplugging the system). It doesn't happen with reboots (sometimes I'm suspecting the ASUS motherboard; as I've seen several weird issues with ASUS in the past, though I'm just not sure). My screen either freezes or just goes blank (and eventually my monitor goes to stand-by) when loading the amdgpu driver.

My experience is that most games work fine (and can play for hours; so I don't think it's the cards), but that there's just some stability issues, where the kernel crashes with a notorious "[drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] *ERROR* ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=xxxx, emitted seq=xxxx"" like message where my screen eventually switches just to stand-by and I have to reboot my system. That's something which I've never experienced on an NVIDIA GPU.

I'd like to see what an Intel card does in regards to stability, as I'd prefer an open source and better supported solution (if the support is actually better, as in my experience with AMD and asking to bi-sect is not very end user friendly; even though I'm not an end user and I'll do my best to see what I can do), I'm just on a limited budget and I'm just not sure about Intel cards in regards of compatibility and performance on Linux, as I can't seem to find that much information (that's why I asked my question here on the forums).

[Panix]

I used a NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti in the past. This was rock solid in my experience. I'll try getting newer / cheap NVIDIA card (as they seem to be extremely expensive and I'm open to any brand as long as the quality is good and it's stable, that's why I asked the question regarding the Intel based cards), to see what it does.
I'm using both an Intel 12th gen CPU and a AMD Ryzen series and this does not affect anything (aside from the kernel configuration) related to gaming. I consider both of them to be stablem.

My experience with configuring an NVIDIA GPU on Linux is relatively easy. Just install the nvidia-drivers package suppported by the GPU, reboot and done (and make sure you're using a supported kernel. I always tend to stick with the LTS kernels).

What distro are you using? I couldn't find any mention of it in your posts.

If you go with Nvidia - it's probably best to use a distro with a very recent kernel - it's most likely that these distros - like Fedora, Opensuse (Tumbleweed) and possibly, the latest Ubuntu - would have the best support with Nvidia + Wayland.

It would be interesting to see if you have a different experience - and if the black screen /freezes are solved.

But, there might be different/new issues - just be aware of it. There's lots of ppl who hate using nvidia gpus - but, I guess that might be because there's steps involved in getting the proprietary driver installed - the FOSS nature of most distros - requires manual installs - whether it's via CLI or enabling 3rd party repos and then 'clicking gui managers' of some kind - to install the binary driver - Ubuntu's method is probably easiest - Fedora is relatively easy - but, maybe a bit more work - and some distros like Debian - requires a lot more work - and afaik, still requires manual commands via CLI.

As far as AMD gpu problems with latter kernels - I haven't heard of that - that sounds peculiar. But, I don't have an AMD gpu - and I mostly research the current situation with amd gpus/drivers with regards to productivity software - in Linux, mostly - but, also Windows.

If all you do is game - an AMD gpu in Linux probably makes more sense (than Nvidia) but if there's crashes or screen issues - one idea is to research the 'error messages/log' you get and see what happens when you do a (google) web search on it?

[nvaert1986]

What distro are you using? I couldn't find any mention of it in your posts.

If you go with Nvidia - it's probably best to use a distro with a very recent kernel - it's most likely that these distros - like Fedora, Opensuse (Tumbleweed) and possibly, the latest Ubuntu - would have the best support with Nvidia + Wayland.

It would be interesting to see if you have a different experience - and if the black screen /freezes are solved.

But, there might be different/new issues - just be aware of it. There's lots of ppl who hate using nvidia gpus - but, I guess that might be because there's steps involved in getting the proprietary driver installed - the FOSS nature of most distros - requires manual installs - whether it's via CLI or enabling 3rd party repos and then 'clicking gui managers' of some kind - to install the binary driver - Ubuntu's method is probably easiest - Fedora is relatively easy - but, maybe a bit more work - and some distros like Debian - requires a lot more work - and afaik, still requires manual commands via CLI.

As far as AMD gpu problems with latter kernels - I haven't heard of that - that sounds peculiar. But, I don't have an AMD gpu - and I mostly research the current situation with amd gpus/drivers with regards to productivity software - in Linux, mostly - but, also Windows.

If all you do is game - an AMD gpu in Linux probably makes more sense (than Nvidia) but if there's crashes or screen issues - one idea is to research the 'error messages/log' you get and see what happens when you do a (google) web search on it?

I'm using Gentoo as a distribution (so I can be very flexible when it comes to the kernel) and Plasma 6.1.5 as my desktop environment.
I've tried kernels from 6.6 up until 6.11 so far, where it's been a constant mixed bag. The 6.7 and 6.8 kernel had weird bugs and the 6.9 kernel showed significant performance losses. The kernels 6.6.x and 6.10.11 seem to be the most stable so far. Kernel 6.11 doesn't boot at all and always freezes when loading. I did try kernel 6.12-rc6 a few weeks ago and it booted, but haven't tried it since.

My experience (based on the GeForce 1070, haven't had any more recent GPU's, so can't judge more recent GPU's) is that if you stick with the LTS kernel, they seem to be extremely stable.

It's unfortunate when it comes to the AMD card (would love not to have these boot issues), and I just can't figure out why. I've even suspected the ASUS motherboard to have some sort of weird BIOS / UEFI bug, as I've had similar weird bugs I experienced on past ASUS boards, but then I'm talking 10 - 12 years ago so I'm not sure whether that's representative; rarely seen issues with MSI based systems, though I don't have any actual hard evidence for this.

[Panix]

I'm using Gentoo as a distribution (so I can be very flexible when it comes to the kernel) and Plasma 6.1.5 as my desktop environment.
I've tried kernels from 6.6 up until 6.11 so far, where it's been a constant mixed bag. The 6.7 and 6.8 kernel had weird bugs and the 6.9 kernel showed significant performance losses. The kernels 6.6.x and 6.10.11 seem to be the most stable so far. Kernel 6.11 doesn't boot at all and always freezes when loading. I did try kernel 6.12-rc6 a few weeks ago and it booted, but haven't tried it since.

My experience (based on the GeForce 1070, haven't had any more recent GPU's, so can't judge more recent GPU's) is that if you stick with the LTS kernel, they seem to be extremely stable.

It's unfortunate when it comes to the AMD card (would love not to have these boot issues), and I just can't figure out why. I've even suspected the ASUS motherboard to have some sort of weird BIOS / UEFI bug, as I've had similar weird bugs I experienced on past ASUS boards, but then I'm talking 10 - 12 years ago so I'm not sure whether that's representative; rarely seen issues with MSI based systems, though I don't have any actual hard evidence for this.

Hmmmm..... I had a friend who used Gentoo - but, I have never used it. I would try another distro but that's probably nothing to do with it.
So, step/experiment #2 - imho - would be to try taking the gpu out - do you have Linux or Gentoo on both machines? You have an Intel and AMD Ryzen PC, right? The Intel pc will have integrated graphics, for sure. If it's the ASUS mobo - then taking out the gpu would isolate the problem to either the pcie slot i.e. pcie x16 - or some other problem - if the boot problem continues. If it doesn't continue - then it's an issue with the amd (FOSS) driver/firmware etc. - something not hardware related.
Right?

Otherwise - a boot problem without the gpu - could be psu related, bios/stability problem - but, I believe you posted an amdgpu crash message - if that's related?

[nvaert1986]

Hmmmm..... I had a friend who used Gentoo - but, I have never used it. I would try another distro but that's probably nothing to do with it.
So, step/experiment #2 - imho - would be to try taking the gpu out - do you have Linux or Gentoo on both machines? You have an Intel and AMD Ryzen PC, right? The Intel pc will have integrated graphics, for sure. If it's the ASUS mobo - then taking out the gpu would isolate the problem to either the pcie slot i.e. pcie x16 - or some other problem - if the boot problem continues. If it doesn't continue - then it's an issue with the amd (FOSS) driver/firmware etc. - something not hardware related.
Right?

Otherwise - a boot problem without the gpu - could be psu related, bios/stability problem - but, I believe you posted an amdgpu crash message - if that's related?

I already did a lot of troubleshooting, but to answer the questions to get a better picture:

- Only the ASUS (AMD Ryzen) motherboard has the issue where there's a delay of display in the POST for both AMD graphics cards (which I think is a BIOS / UEFI bug)
- The ASUS (AMD Ryzen) system sometimes hangs / crashes when the amdpu driver gets loaded when I'm using the integrated graphics too (I normally have this disabled in the BIOS / UEFI).
- Both the ASUS and MSI motherbord have issues with the system hanging or crashing when the amdgpu driver gets loaded on a variety of kernels from a cold boot
- Both the ASUS and MSI system have their own PSU's (the ASUS one has an Corsair RMx Shift 1000W and the MSI system a Corsair RM850, which are known to be good PSU's)
- The MSI systems seems to be running without an issue when the Intel Integrated Graphics driver gets loaded (though I did limited testing; I didn't load any games, because which games can you load on an Intel iGPU?.. but it boots fine)
- Swapping out the PSU's seems to have no effect
- I've tried using an older Enermax Platimax PSU and it seems to give the same results.
- The RDNA2 card is an MSI card and the RDNA3 card is an Sapphire card.

[Panix]

I already did a lot of troubleshooting, but to answer the questions to get a better picture:

- Only the ASUS (AMD Ryzen) motherboard has the issue where there's a delay of display in the POST for both AMD graphics cards (which I think is a BIOS / UEFI bug)
- The ASUS (AMD Ryzen) system sometimes hangs / crashes when the amdpu driver gets loaded when I'm using the integrated graphics too (I normally have this disabled in the BIOS / UEFI).
- Both the ASUS and MSI motherbord have issues with the system hanging or crashing when the amdgpu driver gets loaded on a variety of kernels from a cold boot
- Both the ASUS and MSI system have their own PSU's (the ASUS one has an Corsair RMx Shift 1000W and the MSI system a Corsair RM850, which are known to be good PSU's)
- The MSI systems seems to be running without an issue when the Intel Integrated Graphics driver gets loaded (though I did limited testing; I didn't load any games, because which games can you load on an Intel iGPU?.. but it boots fine)
- Swapping out the PSU's seems to have no effect
- I've tried using an older Enermax Platimax PSU and it seems to give the same results.
- The RDNA2 card is an MSI card and the RDNA3 card is an Sapphire card.

Okay. Is Gentoo on both PCs?

What is the Asus mobo? Also, the delay when the Asus PC boots - is just a delay - not a crash - just a long wait until it finishes the boot? This delay is every boot? If it's every boot - there might have been a 'mod' or change in the boot settings in the BIOS - you might want to check that out and even change it - set the number lower and see if it boots faster? If it's already quite low - then, yes, it could be a bios bug. 'Need to know the Asus mobo name so one could google/web search - but, my first inclination or thought is that boot number (seconds) is too high - maybe?

As for the ASUS and MSI PCs both crashing - due to some amdgpu driver issue - I dunno... I would try a different distro to make sure whether it's a repetitive error - that it's not distro interdependent. It *shouldn't* matter in theory but you never know - trying the latest Fedora or even OpenSUSE Tumbleweed will test the lastest/later kernel to confirm. If you can't even boot latter kernels, then you could try booting with a live usb flash drive.

I would also get a log or error msg for the crashes.

It sounds like both PSUs are fine - right, those a good PSUs.