10 Reasons Linux Gamers Might Want To Pass On The NVIDIA RTX 20 Series

[FireBurn]

unlike other hardware news sides phoronix.com is community driven means: if the company does not send out samples the community helps [email protected] to buy what we need.

i send hundreds of euros and dollars to [email protected] in the past to make things happen.

so why not send him your money to make sure the buy whatever Nvidia product you like to benchmark ? ...

o yes i know... you are one of the many free-ride people who always troll in the forum but never take money into the hand and make yourself dirty to bring change into the world.

My point was - it's nice to see Michael talk trash about nVidia for once

You're right I don't contribute to Phoronix - but I do contribute, whether that's small patches here and there or testing them for others - which is probably more than most do

[rene]

As an occasional driver and kernel developer I find a non open register / programming specification totally unacceptable. Back in the day all register level specs where open, or could be obtained easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJ11_wG_0U If all companies from Intel CPUs over all the other graphic chips in between, ARM And PowerPC to name a few would behave like this we may not even have Linux at all, not knowing how to program the Intel CPU, protected mode, chipset i/o, IDE, SATA, NVMe, network chips, etc. Nvidia is on of the worst companies in this regard and as an early and daily Linux user / developer I always boycotted Nvidia wherever I can. Matrox two decades ago, and now obviously ATi/AMD (if not Intel integrated). What has Nvidia to hide? All the hardware implementation bugs and errata? If you are big in Linux vote with your wallet, do not buy proprietary, non-open stuff.

[WolfpackN64]

with a lot of dropping frames, wayland is worst than X right know and mutter is a nightmare, after years of develop... wayland is only a ilusion

Then Wayland is an illusion that works well on a wide range of hardware... except Nvidia's...

[nomadewolf]

TL DR: Michael couldn't get the card so he is pissed.

Joking aside ; i'm sure these cards will be supported on Linux. How can you come up with something ridicilous like that? Have you ever seen an Nvidia card without drivers for Linux in last 10 years?

About ray tracing ; that is just a marketing tool. Ray tracing will be very limited and uneffective even on Windows in upcoming 2 years.

About Wayland ; c'mon. You can't even use Wayland on AMD/Intel too. Wayland has ways to go for being an alternative to good, old X.

Seriously ; Nvidia makes better cards than AMD in general. You can see that even in a minority market like Linux desktop , Nvidia is the majority.

How does NVidia make better cards exactly?
Sure, nvidia has the fastest cards, no discussion there.
If you're talking GTX 1070 and above, it is better to get Nvidia (because of lower power) than AMD, even though AMD can compete up to GTX 1080 in performance.
BUT, if you're talking GTX 1060 (and lower) AMDs offer are (arguably) better. At the very least AMD goes toe to toe.

[rene]

I don't think the title should be quite that negative...

Nope, it should, for the reasons see my previous post.

[L_A_G]

Nope, it should, for the reasons see my previous post.

Well that was probably the most unnecessary post I've seen in some time... Not only do you try to promote a previous post, that post you're trying to promote beats a particularly dead horse.

[Leopard]

How does NVidia make better cards exactly?
Sure, nvidia has the fastest cards, no discussion there.
If you're talking GTX 1070 and above, it is better to get Nvidia (because of lower power) than AMD, even though AMD can compete up to GTX 1080 in performance.
BUT, if you're talking GTX 1060 (and lower) AMDs offer are (arguably) better. At the very least AMD goes toe to toe.

Sure , first:

1-) Nvidia has the most powerful cards.

2-) Nvidia has better ratio for performance per watt or simply performance / price ratio.

3-) For Linux side: Compability of Nvidia's driver is really good while Mesa is not good on that term. If you say GPU-PRO than i should say performance difference from Mesa. AMD driver side is a mess.

[rene]

Well that was probably the most unnecessary post I've seen in some time... Not only do you try to promote a previous post, that post you're trying to promote beats a particularly dead horse.

it does not promote "beats a particularly dead horse", unless you think AMD and Intel are dead: "As an occasional driver and kernel developer I find a non open register / programming specification totally unacceptable. Back in the day all register level specs where open, or could be obtained easily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJ11_wG_0U If all companies from Intel CPUs over all the other graphic chips in between, ARM And PowerPC to name a few would behave like this we may not even have Linux at all, not knowing how to program the Intel CPU, protected mode, chipset i/o, IDE, SATA, NVMe, network chips, etc. Nvidia is on of the worst companies in this regard and as an early and daily Linux user / developer I always boycotted Nvidia wherever I can. Matrox two decades ago, and now obviously ATi/AMD (if not Intel integrated). What has Nvidia to hide? All the hardware implementation bugs and errata? If you are big in Linux vote with your wallet, do not buy proprietary, non-open stuff."

[cybertraveler]

Michael - Interesting and informative article, thanks

I think you fairly represented the situation on GNU/Linux. As you pointed out, the situation could be very different on Windows.

[Tomin]

Games based on SDL2 2.0.1 or above (which are more than you might think) does have Wayland support.
Dota2 works with a few caveats:
- the steam runtime is shipping a old SDL version, so you have to run it without the steam runtime or overload libSDL2
- Start the game with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland to force enable wayland

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/999

I don't play Dota 2 and I know some libSDL has Wayland support but thanks. I would like to see more games on Steam using Wayland.