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

[nils_]

I'm not too sure how nouveau works with Pascal hardware, but for Maxwell and older, usually the worst-case scenario is poor or lacking power management. So you might be stuck running your GPU at low clock speeds, but otherwise the performance-per-clock is decent. So yes, if nouveau can properly talk to a 2080Ti, it should be perfectly fine for everyday desktop use.

As long as it's at its lowest clock / power draw.... I currently have a GTX 980, had a GTX 780 before which drew a lot of power even when not in use. I might just give this a try, I think it's reasonable to expect a GPU costing in excess of 1000 Euro to allow Desktop use Worst case would be back to running on the Intel GPU.

[nils_]

The 2080Ti is only %35 faster then the 1080Ti which I think is shameful given its starting price is at $1899AUD or $1199USD (going to increase with tariffs). For that price I'd expect at least %100 faster!

I think it's hard to make these linear comparisons (in Germany it's around 800 EUR for the 1080 Ti vs. 1300 EUR for the RTX 2080Ti), but if those 35% can make a lot of difference in user experience once you get beyond a certain FPS threshold. If you're buying the top model, economics isn't really your primary concern.

[dungeon]

Why 10 reasons, should be 20 reasons for 20 Series

But OK I also expect there will be 10 reasons article why nVidia should be used

Why W when X is more used, why everything must be blob or oss if it does not guarantee quality, why most people buy newest gen of whatever if it is available on shelves without thinking anyway, etc...

[zoomblab]

AMD having open drivers and Nvidia closed drivers is irrelevant. YOU shouldn't care about such issue unless you are a kernel or mesa developer.

What should concern YOU is having day 1 rock solid support and performance on the same level as windows. On that respect the AMD strategy of open drivers is WORSE for YOU as well for AMD! Why? Because they have multiple separate drivers to maintain which require multiple teams, multiple effort, and also are tied to somebody elses release schedule. On the other hand with Nvidia you know that you reuse the codebase and leveragethe maintenance that happens for the windows platform. That is good for YOU and smart for Nvidia.

[rene]

AMD having open drivers and Nvidia closed drivers is irrelevant. YOU shouldn't care about such issue unless you are a kernel or mesa developer.

What should concern YOU is having day 1 rock solid support and performance on the same level as windows. On that respect the AMD strategy of open drivers is WORSE for YOU as well for AMD! Why? Because they have multiple separate drivers to maintain which require multiple teams, multiple effort, and also are tied to somebody elses release schedule. On the other hand with Nvidia you know that you reuse the codebase and leveragethe maintenance that happens for the windows platform. That is good for YOU and smart for Nvidia.

Just totally wrong, users choosing Linux for an open system should exactly care about this. If they want closed source they can go to Windows to start with. Open source is about so much more, review ability, security, fixing bugs or implementing new quirks and features yourself, long term maintenance, freedom and such. Oh, and also being able to start a new OS from scratch to start with. Nvidia is basically the only major closed source crap left. If everyone from SATA, NVMe, chipsets, CPUs, etc. pp. would have this attitude Linux would have never been possible. PS: totally unsuitable for mission critical and security related systems. Given GPUs are a whole computer, they could send all your data away to your favourite secret service, or other gangsters, too.

[fuzz]

AMD having open drivers and Nvidia closed drivers is irrelevant. YOU shouldn't care about such issue unless you are a kernel or mesa developer.

What should concern YOU is having day 1 rock solid support and performance on the same level as windows. On that respect the AMD strategy of open drivers is WORSE for YOU as well for AMD! Why? Because they have multiple separate drivers to maintain which require multiple teams, multiple effort, and also are tied to somebody elses release schedule.

You obviously do not know what you are talking about. AMD's official open source drivers work out of the box, without installing anything -- before you can get NVIDIA drivers installed. That is better for the user. Only edge cases need the amdgpu-pro drivers.

[Hibbelharry]

AMD having open drivers and Nvidia closed drivers is irrelevant. YOU shouldn't care about such issue unless you are a kernel or mesa developer.

What should concern YOU is having day 1 rock solid support and performance on the same level as windows. On that respect the AMD strategy of open drivers is WORSE for YOU as well for AMD! Why? Because they have multiple separate drivers to maintain which require multiple teams, multiple effort, and also are tied to somebody elses release schedule. On the other hand with Nvidia you know that you reuse the codebase and leveragethe maintenance that happens for the windows platform. That is good for YOU and smart for Nvidia.

Thats just plain nonsense. With AMD there might be some issues when things are fresh, but the experience is getting flawless after just a short amount of time. With nvidia, you can't use new technolgies like wayland, kms, and many other things for a while. You also need to get the blob working in your personal linux distro of choice instead of having a nice ootb experience, which is extra work. And things get really worse when your card goes legacy. Upgrading your kernel or X or a new version of gcc? With nvidia you'll be out of luck at some point. I've had these issues on notebooks where there was no choice and that was crap.

I've bought a vega64 around 2 weeks ago, for a little less than 500 euros here in germany. Great card, working well!

[L_A_G]

...

Do I actually have to spell this out for you?

Nothing of what you've said in this thread is new or interesting, instead everything you've said has been talked to death years ago. Yes, Nvidia doesn't release specs for their hardware like a lot of people would want them to, causing the development of open source drivers for their hardware to require way more reverse engineering that it should and let's not even go into the firmware signing that completely prevents open source developers from releasing their own drivers on new hardware before Nvidia releases the signatures.

Your dead horse beating really does absolutely nothing!

[Zan Lynx]

The 2080Ti is only %35 faster then the 1080Ti which I think is shameful given its starting price is at $1899AUD or $1199USD (going to increase with tariffs). For that price I'd expect at least %100 faster!

I think people who plan to buy one are smart enough to figure that out.

I somehow get the impression people complaining about Nvidia's prices don't want anyone to buy expensive cards. Why? Who cares what other people do with their money?

[eydee]

Article looks like a bit of anti-Tom's Hardware. They said just buy it, Michael says don't buy it. Both are unreasonable, there's no difference. In reality, we know nothing that isn't pure marketing. Wait for real benchmarks. It may be good, it may be crap, who knows?

We'll skip them anyway, as we already have a video card. Otherwise we couldn't even read the article, and would be staring at a black screen instead of this page.