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Sorry for the rambling. Skip to the end for TL;DR
So, let me first start off by saying that I currently have a Geforce GTX 970, and its age is starting to show. I run Linux (currently Ubuntu) exclusively, and even though I'm on the wrong OS for playing games, it turns out I've played my fair share of them without much trouble. Most recently, I've completed Witcher 3 with both expansions, and using WINE+DXVK it's been a smooth ride. I could not tell the difference between that and a game running natively on Linux, which was quite awesome. Of course I'm using Nvidia's proprietary driver, as the open source "nouveau" is not even playing in the same ballpark.
I was a long time ATI/AMD graphics card user before switching over to NVIDIA. I had a Radeon 9700 (we're talking 2003'ish), and as that got old I switched over to a Radeon HD4870 (somewhere around 2009, I suppose). What I remember most about those days was the constant struggle with "fglrx" (FireGL and Radeon for X11?), which at the time was ATI's proprietary driver for Radeon craphics chips. There was an open source driver (radeon) available, which was good for 2D and some basic 3D, but that was about it. As I wanted 3D acceleration, I "had" to use fglrx, and my X desktop would constantly break after updates, and several popular OpenGL titles worked poorly or is some cases not at all. I remember playing games with Wine was always tricky. Even 2D applications would sometimes be excruciatingly slow. I remember being quite active on forums (mostly on rage3d.com, if I'm not mistaken) and there were always promises of "it will get better soon", "the next release will be better", "just hang on for another 6 months, you'll see" and things like that. Well, it never did, and I finally got tired of waiting and got a GTX 570 (2012'ish, I think), and have not looked back since. Or, until today. I have been trying to follow the news about AMD Radeon cards, and I keep seeing articles about development on the open source driver. The prospect of not having to bother with updating my drivers, just using what's built into the Linux distribution is a nice one. Also, I'd like to try Wayland, which is tricky using NVIDIA and their moronic stance on EGL streams vs GBM. And of course I'd like to support a company that develops open source drivers just for the sake of it!
TL;DR part:
So, what I'm wondering is:
So, let me first start off by saying that I currently have a Geforce GTX 970, and its age is starting to show. I run Linux (currently Ubuntu) exclusively, and even though I'm on the wrong OS for playing games, it turns out I've played my fair share of them without much trouble. Most recently, I've completed Witcher 3 with both expansions, and using WINE+DXVK it's been a smooth ride. I could not tell the difference between that and a game running natively on Linux, which was quite awesome. Of course I'm using Nvidia's proprietary driver, as the open source "nouveau" is not even playing in the same ballpark.
I was a long time ATI/AMD graphics card user before switching over to NVIDIA. I had a Radeon 9700 (we're talking 2003'ish), and as that got old I switched over to a Radeon HD4870 (somewhere around 2009, I suppose). What I remember most about those days was the constant struggle with "fglrx" (FireGL and Radeon for X11?), which at the time was ATI's proprietary driver for Radeon craphics chips. There was an open source driver (radeon) available, which was good for 2D and some basic 3D, but that was about it. As I wanted 3D acceleration, I "had" to use fglrx, and my X desktop would constantly break after updates, and several popular OpenGL titles worked poorly or is some cases not at all. I remember playing games with Wine was always tricky. Even 2D applications would sometimes be excruciatingly slow. I remember being quite active on forums (mostly on rage3d.com, if I'm not mistaken) and there were always promises of "it will get better soon", "the next release will be better", "just hang on for another 6 months, you'll see" and things like that. Well, it never did, and I finally got tired of waiting and got a GTX 570 (2012'ish, I think), and have not looked back since. Or, until today. I have been trying to follow the news about AMD Radeon cards, and I keep seeing articles about development on the open source driver. The prospect of not having to bother with updating my drivers, just using what's built into the Linux distribution is a nice one. Also, I'd like to try Wayland, which is tricky using NVIDIA and their moronic stance on EGL streams vs GBM. And of course I'd like to support a company that develops open source drivers just for the sake of it!
TL;DR part:
So, what I'm wondering is:
- What are YOUR experiences with using recent Radeon graphics cards in Linux? Both positive and negative, please! Extra valuable if you've also had a Geforce and can contrast it with that.
- What is the driver situation like? Reading news on Radeon graphics cards for Linux, I get the idea that there are several competing drivers. Is that the case? What are the pros and cons of the different drivers, and how do I know which one to use? Do you still use "fglrx"?
- Would you get a Radeon RX 5700 (XT or not) today if you were using Linux exclusively? Why?
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