The Current NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance Ahead Of Ampere

[gardotd426]

To be fair, this is only true if you only consider Nvidia isolated from the rest of the world. If you include AMD, the picture is different. AMD is a lot stronger in low end and mid range than Nvidia is. Which means, if there is a choice, people prefer AMD. Thus, for Nvidia customers, low and mid range is underrepresented.

You said (my interpretation) half of nvidia customers buy high end. Considering AMD has no high end and about 50% of the sales, that would mean:
low/midrange is about 75%, high-end 25% if you consider the whole market (which is the only reasonable thing to do).

That's not the context of the conversation. Dude said "nvidiots" buy 2060s. That's wrong. He also said "nobody buys high end," and 25% is definitely not "nobody," it's not even "insignificant," or even "small." That's a huge percentage. Also, AMD doesn't have about 50% of sales. At all. The two data points available indicate AMD at between 30 and 40%. And again, it's not even relevant regardless.

it's actually for anyone with brain. novideo has no benefits performance-wise and has number of downsides quality-of-life-wise

To which I replied

Nvidia outperforms AMD completely at the high end. AMD doesn't even HAVE a high-end card.

To which he he replied by I assume having some sort of stroke or aneurysm, which ended up with him blabbering:

moron, nobody buys high end. average nvidiot buys 2060 and amd is faster

Which is flat-out wrong. It's true in some segments, but this person didn't even attempt to make specific claims, they were 100% general, followed by a blatantly false qualifying statement.

This is what happens when you have a community that's been pretty much exclusively fostered online, is small, insular, and opinionated. You get absolute raging fanatics that are either so stupid, or so malicious, that they spread just completely and utterly false information.

And the thing is, I'm an AMD fan. I've never owned an Nvidia card, and probably never would if it weren't for the fact that AMD's drivers are so terrible and I don't feel like waiting a year or more after every launch for a card to be usable, so I'll have to go with Ampere this time around. I own two Navi GPUs right now, and ran Vega and Polaris before that. But the absolute idiocy on this forum about anything Nvidia is seriously embarrassing. Nvidia has PLENTY of things to be criticized about, so I don't know why so many people here make up imaginary nonsense and make themselves look both crazy and stupid in the process.

[gardotd426]

You're right, it wasn't you our pal responded to, I'm sorry.




What do you do with that many GPUs?

Two? Two GPUs isn't that many. I have two machines. My main Linux gaming rig with a 3800X and 5700 XT, and then a secondary Windows rig with a 3600X and 5600 XT that I use as my own local game streaming client with Parsec and Steam Remote Play to play the games I can't play on my Linux machine directly but without actually having to *use* windows, but also not having to use VFIO (which requires passing through monitors, KVM switches or multiple keyboards, doesn't work with Navi without annoying workarounds, and numerous other compromises, issues). I hardly ever use it, I just end up playing games I have on my Linux machine, but yeah. After upgrading my main rig so much, I literally ended up with a whole second machine short of a chassis and RAM, so I figured "hell, why not just buy the chassis and RAM and I can play any games I want but never have to actually *use* Windows in any real way?" I'm selling the 5600 XT when the new cards launch and I upgrade on my main rig, but yeah, I don't think two GPUs is that strange at all.

Unless you misread where I said "I literally own two Navi GPUs (and have owned 4 AMD GPUs in total)" and thought I mean I own 4 right now.

[digitalsin]

I bought a 5700 xt on launch day direct from AMD's website. At the time the benchmarks were the 5700 xt matching and sometimes out-performing the RTX 2080. I believe this is due to partial functionality where some parts were incomplete or just stubbed out at the time, because now in the benchmarks the 5700 xt lags behind the RTX 2080.

Sure thing that nvidia felt the crunch and did some "optimizations", but I think it is fair to say that the support was not really complete on AMD's end. For example it wasn't until recently that DXVK was working in wine situations. Took about a year (and a newer distro / drivers), but not all things make sense.

Some games on steamplay are rated platinum, but don't work at all - leaves me wondering if they only work on nvidia (even though on proton DB there are some people with AMD GPUs). As example, Devil May Cry 5 suffers from random crashes, even worse is Resident Evil 2 - just crashes upon loading the game. Sure an older version of proton seems to work at first - until the cinematic attempts to play, then crashes. Some talk about a fix that no longer seems to apply.

So there are some things I like about AMD, but it's not all roses. Not at all with nvidia either - I owned a RTX 2080 before returning it and purchasing an AMD. I did this because of issues with some %90 of the distro I attempt to use with the 2080. Some like Ubuntu derivatives never install completely, others like openSuse hang upon reboot / halt on a plain grey screen, MX Linux fails to load X11 - forcing you to toggle to a VT and then back to where X should be - and then somehow it magically working.

I always read how nvidia drivers are so spectacular, when in fact the games people discuss are developed on nvidia gpu, or receive some special "optimization". When in fact the optimizations have gone beyond the driver level, deep down to the architectural level. To my eyes I can see a visible "render-skip" (like frame-skipping but in silicon). I notice this on older opengl titles such as Quake 3 - the movement of the models in relation to the maps' surroundings is jumpy. There's no real way to "fix" it as technically it's not broken, it's just done by design. This is compared to the 5700 xt which is liquid smooth...

So no, either side does not "win", they both have issues :P

[geearf]

Michael could you add one extra graph at the end of geometric mean per dollar?
For people like me not aware of the price of each card, it's hard to know which one should be *better* than another.

Thanks!

[Mel Spektor]

bought a 5600 xt, last week. Not a single crash, well being honest when ocing, after a while the computer might freeze because the card doesn't like the ocing that you input, but that happened on polaris also, might be hitting some limit that I haven't figured out. It's really a nice buy considering that the 2060 is 50 dollars more expensive or even more.
I'm using Mesa 20.1 and kernel 5.8.

[xxmitsu]

Buying an RDNA 1 card is playing russian roulette, because you could end up with consistent driver crashes on Linux like a large number of people do (I posted links above). And there's no way to know whether you'll be one of the unlucky ones or not. I have one RDNA card that has the crashes, and another that doesn't. And even the one that doesn't, even if you don't get absolutely hosed, you'll still likely experience intermittent driver crashes in some games.

Not to mention you need to wait until the new launches regardless, because it would be really dumb to buy a new GPU right now.

I am very curious of finding the culprit on this. I suppose you've tried swapping them between the systems. Does them perform the same? isn't some interaction with some other component like xmp memory profile or overclock or lack of PCI-E 4.0 or something in the system that misbehaves ?

[CochainComplex]

I'm having green screen issue with my RX 5700... Changing kernels did not solve it... Right now I'm using latest kernel 5.8.3 and Mesa 20.1.5...
is anyone else having the same issues when playing games?

Running Kubuntu 20.04.1 but had the same issues with Fedora 32...

As written prior owning a 5700xt - I have never had the issues you are describing. Using this navi card starting from Kernel 5.3 to now 5.8 with always oibafs ppa or dIy compiled from git. (with kernel 5.3 it was sometimes a bit unreliable - dmesg errors but dispite of this no issues) I would recommend you to use oibaf drivers their are always pulled fresh git ones. Maybe that helps. Otherwise I would think of defective card or some other Hardware issues. Even broken cable or monitor socket issues. Friend of mine had similar issues (nvidia) but it was a defective PSU.

https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

[Ardje]

Now do this test again in 10 years with the latest and greatest distributions at that moment.
For me the most important thing is Return On Relatively Long Investment without too many hassles.

[chocolate]

I'm having green screen issue with my RX 5700... Changing kernels did not solve it... Right now I'm using latest kernel 5.8.3 and Mesa 20.1.5...
is anyone else having the same issues when playing games?

Running Kubuntu 20.04.1 but had the same issues with Fedora 32...

Might it be a VRAM overheating problem? I had a green screen corruption issue last month, but since then I have both added some fans to the case and upgraded Linux and Mesa to the same versions you indicated; no more issues thus far. I have the worst RX 5700 model in existence, which is Asus' first iteration of the "TUF" cooling design relying solely on convection for the memory chips, but I'm not having thermal problems anymore, since my motherboard is mounted horizontally and two fans now push air directly to the GPU from the side.
I've found ACO to still be unstable in RotTR on Mesa 20.1.x (e.g. the Croft Manor DLC doesn't start at all, whereas it does with LLVM), so be aware of that if you're using RADV.

[Mel Spektor]

yep I also got green screen when overclocking sounds like an overheating or a voltage issue to me.