Nouveau Lands Initial Open-Source NVIDIA Turing Support - But No GPU Acceleration

[DIRT]

My friends are still hooked on Nvidia cards because historically they have had better drivers and better performance. I don't see them switching to red any time soon. I don't think they believe me when I tell them AMD drivers are now better than Nvidia drivers. Makes no sense, AMD has better performance/price and better drivers.

[yokem55]

AMD and Intel have better drivers when it comes to the integration with the rest of the Linux graphics stack. There is no dispute about that and the open source nature of the drivers make that integration far easier.

When it comes to game compatibility though, a quick run through Protondb will show a lot of games that have great ratings with Nvidia hardware (and drivers) while showing a poor experience on AMD. Maybe folks are testing with outdated mesa stacks and kernels, but even Michael with the latest bleeding edge stuff had trouble recently with AMD hardware benchmarkng with Deus Ex. It sure looks to me like there are still quite a few issues with AMD drivers when it comes to gaming. And for some folks, putting up with the issues posed by Nvidia's closed source drivers are worth it.

[cybertraveler]

When it comes to game compatibility though, a quick run through Protondb will show a lot of games that have great ratings with Nvidia hardware (and drivers) while showing a poor experience on AMD. Maybe folks are testing with outdated mesa stacks and kernels, but even Michael with the latest bleeding edge stuff had trouble recently with AMD hardware benchmarkng with Deus Ex. It sure looks to me like there are still quite a few issues with AMD drivers when it comes to gaming. And for some folks, putting up with the issues posed by Nvidia's closed source drivers are worth it.

I wonder if that phenomenon could be partly a result of NVIDIA's market dominance. If you're a PC game development team, you're probably going to focus most of your testing on NVIDIA hardware, because it's likely most of your customers will be using that.