NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Linux Gaming Performance

[smitty]

Ah, the waiting game which AMD GPU fans love so much. How long have you been waiting for a card which beats NVIDIA? For five or six years already? Where's your love on Steam HW Survey BTW? Looks like aside from Phoronix no one uses AMD.

When it comes to performance, sensible people spend their GPU budget on whatever gives the most performance. It is entirely possibly for a company like Nvidia to have the fastest possibly card, which if that falls in your budget is the card for you, while at the same time it is AMD has the faster card at a price point that fits a more common budget, e.g., a mid-range card.

The other funny thing I have noticed is that AMD starts a bit slow out of the gate when it comes to driver optimizations but those optimizations don't seem to stop. In effect AMD cards get faster as time goes on which might be bad for AMD as it increases the usable lifespan for their kit. Vulkan has had a huge effect by offering a performant alternative to OpenGL where Nvidia had done some (multi-threading??) magic to pull out a big lead in OpenGL.

[rene]

And I never said I wanted to run binary only stuff. Again, open source fans see the world only in black and white, while it's shades of grey and on your shiny PC with 100% open source Linux you're still running closed source firmware for your motherboard (UEFI BIOS), SSD/HDD, NIC, WiFi/BlueTooth and GPU. How do you sleep at night? You must be waking up every half an hour screaming in pain.



Sorry, this is just crap. 99.99% of users out there cannot debug anything even if they get paid to do that. Serious AMD/Intel GPU bugs sometimes take years to resolve despite "it's all open source and everyone can contribute" except only core Intel and AMD developers do contribute because GPU drivers are the most complicated drivers in the known universe.

Again, crap on top of crap. You live in an open source fairy tale where Open Source software is perfect, only right of this moment I have at least half a dozen bugs in the Linux kernel itself for my hardware some of which were reported years ago and no one gives a fuck.

Or take this bug for example. Multiple, literally millions of systems are affected, and Linux developers say some crap why it can't be solved: Well, TBH, it is probably that there is no way to fix this. The root cause is that ACPI claims some resources that will possibly be used by the ACPI AML code, but the native nct6775 driver also requests the same piece of resource.

Or take this bug which took me a good amount of debugging and the help of a number of Linux kernel developers including Linus Torvalds himself. The bug rendered a good amount of laptops dead on boot. No one cared except me. People would have given up on Linux entirely if not me. That's all so fucking disgusting. An Open Source dream. More like an open source hell where no one is responsible for anything at all.

The huge difference is that firmware does not run in your main CPU, and provide a clean API to access. While Nvidia's driver is messing around whatever it wants in your single kernel address space, and is AFAIR in violation of the GPL while doing so.

[rene]

Yes, it is not a religion and it is used to get stuff done.
But you are (possibly) breaching other ppl copyrights (and disrespecting _their_ work) by installing binary only, closed source, OS drivers.
Use them if you need, but do not "brag" about it.

Amen.

[birdie]

What!?!?

Have you ever been on a call with MS as private user?
You are kidding, right?

In my last corporate experience it took 4++ weeks to sort out a Windows Authentication issue (Kerberos), while trying to deny that they support it and attempting to sell us any kind of alternative solution.

A fucking month, are you serious?

I can show you hundreds of bugs in almost all serious open source projects some of which are more than ten years old, have dozens of duplicates and no one gives a fuck.

OMG. And you also had it fixed for ya.

The huge difference is that firmware does not run in your main CPU, and provide a clean API to access. While Nvidia's driver is messing around whatever it wants in your single kernel address space, and is AFAIR in violation of the GPL while doing so.

You have no clue what firmware is and how it works. It can do anything and everything with your system.

Violation of GPL? Are you alright? Is this some kind of canon?

[birdie]

When it comes to performance, sensible people spend their GPU budget on whatever gives the most performance. It is entirely possibly for a company like Nvidia to have the fastest possibly card, which if that falls in your budget is the card for you, while at the same time it is AMD has the faster card at a price point that fits a more common budget, e.g., a mid-range card.

The other funny thing I have noticed is that AMD starts a bit slow out of the gate when it comes to driver optimizations but those optimizations don't seem to stop. In effect AMD cards get faster as time goes on which might be bad for AMD as it increases the usable lifespan for their kit. Vulkan has had a huge effect by offering a performant alternative to OpenGL where Nvidia had done some (multi-threading??) magic to pull out a big lead in OpenGL.

I thought this discussion was about the merits of open vs closed source in regard to GPUs and Linux. And if we go your way, I never buy GPUs which cost more than $300 because everything above that point has a pretty horrible price to performance ratio, including AMD:

My current GPU is GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which is not the best in this regard but I'm quite content with its performance and thermals. I had RX 5600 XT for five months but I got rid of it because Open Source AMD drivers turned out to be horrible:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207441

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207735

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207881

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207561 (the only one that got fixed)

Unlike open source fan-atics on Phoronix I always have facts on my side. I don't throw judgmental superficial and unwarranted crap at people, "closed source sucks because it sucks". No, I prefer high-quality software, no matter its license.

[Grinness]

Even so it's still very large, the Intel drivers barely register by comparison. As discrete cards become ever more complex there are also disadvantages of shipping drivers with the kernel.

Which disadvantages do you refer to?

[wberrier]

I think AMD's work on an open driver (despite any motivation for doing so) is amazing, and I vote with my wallet: Ryzen 3 1200 + RX560 (picopsu build). I've had too many issues dealing with the nvidia driver over the years. (Not to say I haven't had *any* issues with amd).

Some of the comments here about performance remind me of something Ethan said a while back when porting stuff to linux (can't find the quote, but paraphrasing): "is the performance good enough to run and enjoy the game?"

My family has a bunch of haswell thinkpads that I'd eventually like to upgrade to the Ryzen variants, but I'll have to wait until I can get them used at a hefty discount.

I'm definitely happy and willing to support a company that makes my life easier to run Linux by releasing source code. Will that eventually backfire for them in terms of competition? (ie: will Intel's drivers gain an advantage based off AMD's work? I suppose that's a possibility...). AMD is taking a risk developing products this way and I hope it will pay off for them.

I like AMD's style, for example, AMD: Mantle/Vulkan (vendor neutral), NVIDIA: CUDA (vendor lock-in).

This all being said, these results of the 3080 are truly impressive, and these products' creators ought to be proud. Can't wait to see how Big Navi measures up! I wasn't holding my breath until I saw Nvidia's launch prices (hrm, it's as if they know something about upcoming products).

Cheers!

[wberrier]

I thought this discussion was about the merits of open vs closed source in regard to GPUs and Linux. And if we go your way, I never buy GPUs which cost more than $300 because everything above that point has a pretty horrible price to performance ratio, including AMD:

My current GPU is GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which is not the best in this regard but I'm quite content with its performance and thermals. I had RX 5600 XT for five months but I got rid of it because Open Source AMD drivers turned out to be horrible:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207441

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207735

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207881

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207561 (the only one that got fixed)

Unlike open source fan-atics on Phoronix I always have facts on my side. I don't throw judgmental superficial and unwarranted crap at people, "closed source sucks because it sucks". No, I prefer high-quality software, no matter its license.

Thanks for the bug reports! Hopefully by the time I upgrade to that generation these will be fixed

Honestly though, I'm hoping power/suspend/resume issues will get ironed out now that these gpus are beginning to be shipped in mobile products (chromebooks/laptops).

[Grinness]

I thought this discussion was about the merits of open vs closed source in regard to GPUs and Linux. And if we go your way, I never buy GPUs which cost more than $300 because everything above that point has a pretty horrible price to performance ratio, including AMD:

My current GPU is GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which is not the best in this regard but I'm quite content with its performance and thermals. I had RX 5600 XT for five months but I got rid of it because Open Source AMD drivers turned out to be horrible:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207441

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207735

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207881

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207561 (the only one that got fixed)

The first issue in your list is fixed:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1164

the second one appears to be a repetition of the first

the third one appears on a old kernel "Fedora 32 and Linux 5.6.14 vanilla." -- Unfortunately I do not own an RDNA card to test -- I am on an old Polaris

If you use latest harwdare, you need a rolling release distro (or compile form sources/use Gentoo) -- that's how you get your support out of the box in an opensource stack

There is nothing intrinsically wrong in open-source (w.r.t. closed that has some long term support implication -- stating facts, no fan-atics)
You need to know what you "buy" -- which is a true-fact in any scenario and context

[birdie]

The first issue in your list is fixed:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1164

the second one appears to be a repetition of the first

the third one appears on a old kernel "Fedora 32 and Linux 5.6.14 vanilla." -- Unfortunately I do not own an RDNA card to test -- I am on an old Polaris

If you use latest harwdare, you need a rolling release distro (or compile form sources/use Gentoo) -- that's how you get your support out of the box in an opensource stack

Fedora is rolling enough, thank you very much and also I always compile my own fresh vanilla kernel to gain some speed (Fedora's default GCC flags are quite unforgiving). Also, are you saying the user has to forgo stability just to use his hardware properly? God, this is just sad and ugly, not to mention that rolling distros often push updates which break everything.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong in open-source (w.r.t. closed that has some long term support implication -- stating facts, no fan-atics)
You need to know what you "buy" -- which is a true-fact in any scenario and context

There's one intrinsically wrong thing about open source and it's its apologists who 1) choose to overlook huge bugs and never ending issues 2) keep on attacking closed source software without doing anything for open source other than leaving comments like "NVIDIA SUCKS" everywhere 3) pretend that everything could be open sourced - and that, sir, is not going to happen ever.

In short, Open Source fans are what makes (the) Open Source (movement) look horrible. Instead of exercising modesty, admitting innate issues, they scream off the top of their lungs that "CLOSED SOURCE SOFTWARE AND COMPANIES WHICH CREATE SUCH SOFTWARE SUCK!!!" Luckily 99.99% of people out there will never hear this crap.