AMD Linux Graphics No Longer Unusable For Blender Developers: 251 To 9 Seconds Speed-Up

[Hibbelharry]

FTFY
No need to attach blame where there is none.

That was no fix. Wayland works pretty well these days. Less so with nvidia GPU but generally it does.

[mSparks]

That was no fix. Wayland works pretty well these days. Less so with nvidia GPU but generally it does.

No, no it doesn't .
It is still missing key basic display features such as color profile management and window management (xrandr), absolutely no one is close to deploying wayland native apps, with everything running through xwayland - and all the bugs of both X and wayland that come with that, the list goes on.

That has nothing to do with either nvidia or AMD, its unusable for daily driving real work regardless of what GPU you put in your system.

It is a good option if you are developing a super light OS like say for an In Car Entertainment system, but for anything more demanding than that calling it a bug-shit-show is overly polite. Dumpster fire of epic incompetence layered in toxic shit that makes systemd look well designed and windows look stable, washed in moronic choices spanning more than a decade would be closer to the truth.

AMD is slightly faster at incorporating wayland garbage, but that is only because the same people writing wayland send their shit over to the open source AMD drivers.

I wouldnt be remotely surprised if the bug in the OP is one of their contributions to the AMD experience, it seems fully consistent with their priorities and code quality.

[piotrj3]

You seriously think i have time or enjoy to go and just "sh*t" on a company out of enjoyment. Well in that case i could do it with passion with Microsoft, but instead i rather be positive in life and not think about Microsoft anymore as they only bring up all the stress and trauma's i have had with it during my personal and professional life.

Let me give you a few Nvidia issues i have had.

- My browser just flikkering. I have to move my mouse or press KDE menu button to make it snap out of it. And yes this constantly every few minutes if i don't move the mouse. No it was not because of the Vulkan option in the browser being turned on.
- When KDE installs updates it reboots, installs updates and reboots again to go in to the desktop interface. The part of installing updates..i just have a black screen. One day by accident i did not reboot the computer and came to know that indeed it was rebooting and installed the updates.
- Fedora comes with the latest stable Linux kernel, Nvidia card cannot handle it, because the kernel is not yet compatible with the Nvidia driver. (this even happend just friday or saturday with Linux kernel 6.4.4..that is when i decided i have had enough of this nonsense.
- The login screen of KDE, the mouse being SUPER slow until i can click and type my password.
- Random: Just being on the computer ..suddenly black screen..no CLI with F2 or F3 as it isn't a display manager issue. Even the monitor not detecting any signal anymore.
- I use Viber as a videocall application with friends and family. Installed it through Flatpak..just a window border, but no window of the application it self.

These on top of my head and no really i am not kidding you..ALL of those issues..disappeared when i changed to AMD. So no i am not doing it out of enjoyment. Too much stress and i was almost scolding myself by not buying an AMD card much sooner. Life is too short by being surrounded by negative people or equipment that bring up negative emotions.

now as Nvidia user with KDE:
- AD1. flickering - reason is entirly diffrent on X and Wayland. X it is simply allowing tearing by default and some settings like triple buffering to full composistion pipiline removes it, or simply using gsync/freesync etc. On Wayland well it is really complicated situation mostly due to explicit vs implicit synchronization model. But nvidia (and not only nvidia) works on allowing Wayland to support explicit synchronization present to solve it,
- AD2. I agree with KDE updates, common issue, heck even restart button in menu doesn't work after update, you need to write reboot in terminal and after reboot stuff works again, but yea really common hassle,
- AD3. You can turn that question other way around - what if you use some distro with older kernel (idk let's say Ubuntu 22.04 LTS very popular distro choice) and it doesn't have support for newest AMD GPU out of box. Well in case of Nvidia you just install newest driver (and Nvidia supports newest hardware pretty much day 1 on linux mostly) without forcing you to pick some extremly fresh kernel, so I agree there are issues with Nvidia way of updating, there are also benefits to it,
- AD4. I didn't expierience that on Kubuntu.
- AD5. Didnt' expierience that,
- AD6. Never used Viber and never installed such stuff through Flatpak. But discord screen sharing worked for me.
That being said I used mostly Kubuntu default (X server on Nvidia). Tried Wayland a bit and it is kinda functional but with more issues for sure.

A lot of however Nvidia issues with Wayland (or linux in general) kinda originate from that open source people pick some design choices without much thinking can it really work right way for users. A lot of times it is "art for sake of art" not for sake of usability. Examples could be ignoring that world moved to explicit synchronization model while Linux/Wayland is left implicit, DMA-BUF marked as GPL-only symbol (making it more pain for Nvidia users again), ignoring Nvidia criticism for GBM and entire situation with EGLstreams (both solutions had own issues, but clearly with better cooperation we could have something better then both), and some issues are literally nature of OpenGL being horrible (like I remember bugs in KDE of sort hey after some operation state is undefined, MESA assumed one, Nvidia assumed another - of course KDE devs assumed MESA version, and Erik from Nvidia made PR to force set state to avoid that undefined behaviour.

Now Nvidia is most apparent to suffer from those issues. But not just Nvidia, I remember AMD and Intel developers complaining about implicit synchronization heck even Joshua from DXVK/Valve wants it, AMD propertiary GPU drivers probably don't enjoy some GPL-only symbols (yay double effort to maintain drivers!), I kinda remembered some buffer issue when AMD dev admitted they would need to use something similar to EGLstreams to solve something, OpenGL undefined behaviours are subject river... Things are getting better in general, but a lot of those issues could be avoided.

And regarding main subject in thread Nvidia would fix you those bugs, as they do. Explicit synchronization for present is done by Nvidia employe in Wayland/Xwayland. Erik had plenty of contributions to KDE as example and a lot of them were bug fixes. A lot of issues Nvidia-only comes to that no one tests dev like build on nvidia before shipping. So yes you do face some bugs, but I would say Nvidia seems to be doing pretty good considering no one tests new Kernels against Nvidia driver or new versions of Wayland/X server.

[mrg666]

Without replying to any nvidia.vs.amd, x11.vs.wayland, kde.vs.gnome nonsense that filled the thread so far, this is a good example that Valve has become such an important supporter of Linux. I have just upgraded from 6800xt to 7900xt and it is working great so far with Ubuntu 23.04, kernel 6.4.6, Plasma on Wayland, and latest Mesa (using kisak ppa). Thank you AMD and Valve

[polarathene]

Let me give you a few Nvidia issues i have had.

- My browser just flikkering. I have to move my mouse or press KDE menu button to make it snap out of it. And yes this constantly every few minutes if i don't move the mouse. No it was not because of the Vulkan option in the browser being turned on.
- When KDE installs updates it reboots, installs updates and reboots again to go in to the desktop interface. The part of installing updates..i just have a black screen. One day by accident i did not reboot the computer and came to know that indeed it was rebooting and installed the updates.
- Fedora comes with the latest stable Linux kernel, Nvidia card cannot handle it, because the kernel is not yet compatible with the Nvidia driver. (this even happend just friday or saturday with Linux kernel 6.4.4..that is when i decided i have had enough of this nonsense.
- The login screen of KDE, the mouse being SUPER slow until i can click and type my password.
- Random: Just being on the computer ..suddenly black screen..no CLI with F2 or F3 as it isn't a display manager issue. Even the monitor not detecting any signal anymore.
- I use Viber as a videocall application with friends and family. Installed it through Flatpak..just a window border, but no window of the application it self.

I'm a bit late to the party here, and the discussion on subsequent pages got lengthy so apologies for not having time to read through all that

I've used nvidia GTX 1070 since 2016 until just recently. I also used KDE. Below turned out lengthy, so no worries if you don't have time for it yourself :P

- No major issue with browsers.
- There was in the past IIRC where sometimes it'd alternate between current and previous frame or something like that. And some weird scroll jitter behaviour but not sure if that was GPU related.
- For really long lived (weeks) browser sessions, with 40+ windows and hundreds to thousands of tabs (not all active), the browser would become unresponsive (no updated frames, unable to resize/move window), again not sure if that was an nvidia specific issue. Used Firefox around 2016, but switched to Chromium probably around 2018 or so.
- In VMWare and QEMU/KVM VM guests with 3D accel, Firefox and Chromium had notable graphic glitches. These shouldn't have been specific to nvidia AFAIK as they're using open-source drivers specific to each hypervisor. Haven't checked on another system yet, so possibly nvidia related.

- No major issues with system updates.
- Other than on my Arch system kernel modules (for anything needing them) would have issues until a restart since the booted kernel files were deleted on disk as part of the update. I usually update when I'm ready to reboot.
- I do recall one, but probably KDE specific. Updating the kernel / nvidia driver sometimes prevented me from using the GUI to reboot. The taskbar launcher button, to the power button which brings up the different choices like reboot. I think I'd instead need to open a terminal and type a D-BUS command specific to KDE to restart the system properly (save my session state), otherwise it's a `shutdown -r now` or hard reset where I'd lose that state (window placement, etc).
- I did try Fedora once on the system and I found it quite annoying with nvidia, but also other proprietary software like VMware. So I think these choices play into it a bit. On Arch which would get new kernels often nvidia was always fine, but I used DKMS.

- Login screen, no issues. My personal system usually logs in automatically though and I rarely need the lock screen. Even when I did have it up I don't recall any responsiveness issues.

- Random blackscreen issue... can't say I recall this. I do remember in the past kwin_x11 would crash but not restart/recover automatically, so the desktop session was not updating visually. I had to change TTY and run `kwin_x11 --replace` then change back. It'd usually restore things but not perfectly and be best to save work and restart. Presumably an nvidia issue.

- I don't use Viber. Or Flatpak really. I have used apps like Discord and GitKraken (both Electron based) that utterly failed on me after one update. It was due to the kernel + Intel CPU with IBT being enabled by default and the nvidia driver at the time not supporting it, which required a kernel boot param to fix (just to boot I think?). The performance of anything needing 3D accel was piss poor or for GitKraken just straight up failed to open the app. Turned out that the third-party nvidia va-api package I had wasn't playing nice (I think it was related to that IBT kernel update), and had to remove that to get things working properly again (at expense of losing the video accel via va-api).

- One issue that was horrible, was nvidia + KDE specific and affected me for several years on the system until resolved. I believe you had to suspend / resume the system, but you'd get graphical artifacts of blue/yellow squares scattered across the screen until a restart I think.


Apart from poor performance with VirGL for 3D accel in VM guests, I think that about covers it. It wasn't great but doesn't seem like it was as bad as you experienced. I've been aware of various AMD GPU driver issues over those years too though, so I know it's not smooth sailing just by being on AMD either, but here's hoping the AMD GPU experience is good for going forward too

[ezst036]

You know a blanket statement like this is complete BS when it spends two paragraphs stating something is horrible without providing a single example and to trump it all, we're in the news piece which discusses a missed optimization in the open source driver which resulted a 25 fold slow down. And the fix is yet to be released.

I mean right now this issue doesn't exist for Nvidia users but here we are discussing AMD and it won't be a Linux related forum if someone doesn't sh*t on Nvidia without providing any reasons for hating the company.

No idea how to call it, pathetic? Cringe? Bigotry? It's you to decide.

You don't even use Blender, do you?

[avis]

You don't even use Blender, do you?

I use Blender but not professionally. Amazing how the news piece is about buggy open source AMD drivers which work 25 times slower than they should yet here we are discussing how bad NVIDIA is.

[Magissia]

...

Honestly the only nvidia gpu drivers issues I had were caused by ubunutu graphic driver team blindly pushing updates that didn't support my GPU because they felt the latest driver branch were okay. I had to wait for 3 new branches to get drivers with support for my GPU again from the repo. If I just followed whatever the nvidia website gave me, it would have been easier.

I started with a 3.x kernel and now run on 5.4 kernel with the same gpu, this gpu was released in 2012 yet it was updated to support vulkan 1.2 which allowed me to play games from time to time.

I do not have any display issues compared to when I use the Intel igp with open source drivers. The computer can run months without crashes and I only reboot if I did a kernel update resolving a security flaw where I could be affected.

GPU accelerated password cracking software works without issues too...

Support from nvidia is clearly acceptable.

Real issues I faced were caused by wayland (productivity tools don't work there, not drivers related) or were glibc related (backward compatibility isn't up to what Microsoft provides, still not nvidia drivers related) or canonical (refuse to upgrade critical libs where remote endpoint made breaking API changes and fix is available upstream)

[qarium]

Without replying to any nvidia.vs.amd, x11.vs.wayland, kde.vs.gnome nonsense that filled the thread so far, this is a good example that Valve has become such an important supporter of Linux. I have just upgraded from 6800xt to 7900xt and it is working great so far with Ubuntu 23.04, kernel 6.4.6, Plasma on Wayland, and latest Mesa (using kisak ppa). Thank you AMD and Valve

yes Valve is really great these days.

[Magissia]

but who uses a modern OS with extremely outdated hardware?

Define extremely outdated. Is decade old extremely outdated?

I do run multiple GTX 285, GTX 460 and Quadro k1000m with 5.4++ kernels. It's more than enough for office work, light GPU cracking, 1080p encoding, light gaming. I do not intent replacing these machines as they are still capable of accomplishing their tasks. At some point the hard drives were replaced by SSDs... the associated CPU never hit 100% unless compiling something... and unless compiling libre office or web browser, the compile time are acceptable for my use case. If I really need to compile something bloated I'll borrow some CPU cycles from the epyc server out of heavy usage hours.