GTX 1060 vs. RX 480 - The ~$200 GPU Decision For Linux Gamers

[dungeon]

Do you like linux and oss then go with Amd.

I like oss, but supertux is slowish on mesa and say iortcw flicker like crazy with DRI3 Flash is borked on DRI3 and i get immidiate total lockup with amdgpu using UVD

As i don't have 10 hands to open and observe all those bugs, i mostly just wait for good weather

[dungeon]

As i don't have 10 hands to open and observe all those bugs, i mostly just wait for good weather

As i don't have 10 hands to open and observe all those bugs (since llvm is currently crazy), i mostly just wait for good weather

[pmorph]

Considering Nvidia has been caught lying and cheating for 10+ years now, have gone full blown windows 10 on data mining and personal info collection, bullies the community into getting what they want rather than working with them, has no open source anything... I don't have a fucking clue why people buy their hardware.

I do despise their marketing strategies and PR.
But I respect the skill of their engineers, and the product made by those engineer is what I am paying for.

[Beherit]

Whenever opinions on the state of AMD drivers are shared, the positive ones always seem to be in a future tense. "It will", "in the future", "will get there", "looking forward to".

[dopehouse]

Like with Linux 4.9 on some of my cards powered by AMDGPU and at least with one of my 4K monitors, every 15~20 minutes it seems to like taking a really long blank or lose its signal for 1~2 seconds but without reporting any problems to dmesg, etc.

I had similar problems with my rx480 and my HDMI connected display with windows while playing games. As soon as the GPU had to do some heavy work (Playing Mafia 3), my display turns black for about half a second without reporting any problems every 20-30 seconds. With one of my games (Train Simulator 2017) it even took about 10 seconds for the display to come up again with some strange noise from the display, after leaving the game.

I resolved the problem by using an DisplayPort to HDMI adapter. I was not able to reproduce the problem with linux, because I wasn't able to run steam at the time after updating to Ubuntu 16.10. Is your 4K display connected via DP? If it's connected via HDMI, have you tried to use an DP->HDMI adapter?

[Gusar]

Nvidia does not tell which version of the kernel the driver supports. You need to read internet forums/blogs to check the situation. I do not respect companies that hide information.

Look at the date of a driver release, look at the date of a kernel release. If the latter is newer than the former, chances are it won't work. There's no "hiding" anywhere. Sure the changelog could be more specific than "Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels.", but still, you're making it out as if Nvidia is intentionally withholding vital information. Of all the valid things one could bring up regarding Nvidia (some already mentioned in this thread), this one is just... lame.

[Gusar]

You can not figure anything from the kernel or driver date.

If the kernel is newer than the driver, it likely won't work. What else is there to figure out? It's not rocket science. This only matters for custom kernels anyway, the distro will take care of the driver for use with distro kernels. If not, use a less crappy distro.

[Gusar]

So you do believe that distro packagers can test better than nvidia with all the various cards. Think again, which one has the greatest resources. Use the driver from nvidia site.

What do you think the distros package, if not the driver from the nvidia site? They just compile the kernel part for the distro-shipped kernel. The userspace parts are completely closed anyway, the distro doesn't touch them, except put them in the correct place. What does this have to do with testing or anything? You're really reaching here. Just admit that your point was a bad one and move on. The problems with Nvidia are bigger than the driver not working with unreleased or just released kernels. That's nothing, that's something all out-of-tree drivers have in common, closed or open ones (for example, Realtek has usb wifi drivers that are open, but work only up to specific kernel versions, for newer kernels you need to go hunt down patches from random people's github repositories).

[starshipeleven]

People are all about Wayland, but it's really just now hitting it's stride. Fedora will be the first major distro to ship with Wayland as a default next week....working on the Nvidia blob. This is a big hit to the AMD argument for many people who don't have this philosophical need for open drivers.

Yeah, yeah, we will see how many people will switch to GNOME 3 because of Wayland support on NVIDIA. You don't need to be phylosophical to see GNOME as a BAD desktop.

I tell you, that move is only a symptom that GNOME3 is desperately trying to get new usebase, because it is dying!

/generic trolling

[Gusar]

And add dependencies that can break your os, especially when you want to remove the driver.

Wait, what?? What kind of crappy distro are you using?

You have to admit that amdgpu kernel driver is better solution than a separate kernel driver.

Of course an in-tree driver is better than an out-of-tree driver. But I'll just point out here that you can't use the in-tree amdgpu driver with amdgpu-pro.