NVIDIA R530 vs. AMD Linux 6.3 + Mesa 23.2-dev Gaming Performance

[V1tol]

Never want to do nvidia crapshow again. Had a Dell notebook with 2060 (not some stupid Asus) and while main system used Intel graphics utilizing nvidia only for 3d, the mere existence of nvidia modules was making system extremely unstable. For example, Wine prefix creation - hello 2 seconds lag when you even can't move your cursor. Unload nvidia modules - everything is butter smooth. Now happy full-AMD desktop user and will never buy anything novideo again.

[shinger]

All fine and dandy, but majority of my time i am just trying to be productive with every now and then playing a game. Nvidia drivers installed (yes the latest)..my browser is constantly flikkering..yes i am using KDE Pasma (with wayland). If i would not know better where the rootcause of the problem was, i would have hated Linux.

But i know better and yes some people would say just use the Nouveau drivers, no offense but they are even worse. And no offense to those guys that are doing the development of those drivers as they themselves have to find out how Nvidia cards work. So a lot of respect to those guys, but i can imagine that it is a lost cause.

What i hate the most about Linux are Nvidia drivers and Forticlient pain in the ..ss software i have to use for work..in other words Linux is awesome but when you have to use some essential stuff it really tests your patience.

For me also, my next build (hope in a few years) all AMD build. About the Forticlient, thinking about the best solution maybe is just have that disaster of a VPN software just run in a docker container. BTW, even with my previous job when i had to deal with forticlient on Windows it was still a disaster.

[finalzone]

I am more impressed with Mesa driver delivering excellent performance given its open source nature making easier to contribute as tester. Like a few comments mentioned previously, my desktop system runs on RDNA 2 architecture notably Sapphire Nitro Plus Pure RX 6950XT ( a major upgrade from the retired Radeon RX 560 4GB relegated to backup). Few days ago, I was amazed at the performance of Forza Horizons 5 running on extreme at 4K (may downgrade to ultra because of minimal visual difference) from Steam without the need of manual settings to proton. Few items to workout outside Mesa, optimizing HIP-runtime and HIP Ray for applications like Blender.
All done on Fedora 38 Workstation running on kernel 6.3 with enabled amd_pstate set to active.

[WannaBeOCer]

This sounds like something that you have to do only if you have recently released hardware in order to achieve optimal experience. I have an RX 580 and I've even used LTS distros with LTS kernel on it and the experience was great. It's a gross misconception that you always need the latest kernel if you have an AMD / Intel GPU.

Gross misconception? I can understand if you play older titles sure that can get you by but new titles require driver updates to address driver bugs/performance issues. Especially if a title utilizes any of the new Vulkan extensions. Windows has game ready drivers for this reason. Doubt that will magically change on Linux for new titles.

For example when I had my Radeon VII I had to update my Mesa driver to version 19.3 to easily enable the ACO compiler:

https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/19.3.0.html

Just noticed I switched from AMD to Nvidia in 2020, after looking at this driver release.

[smitty3268]

Gross misconception? I can understand if you play older titles sure that can get you by but new titles require driver updates to address driver bugs/performance issues. Especially if a title utilizes any of the new Vulkan extensions. Windows has game ready drivers for this reason. Doubt that will magically change on Linux for new titles.

Generally speaking you only need to update Mesa these days, not the kernel driver (or LLVM). And even that doesn't always need to be done. A lot of times issues with new games will be fixed in DXVK, rather than needing any driver updates directly. Having that kind of translation layer that games run under makes linux a bit different than windows, in both good and bad ways.

[WannaBeOCer]

Generally speaking you only need to update Mesa these days, not the kernel driver (or LLVM). And even that doesn't always need to be done. A lot of times issues with new games will be fixed in DXVK, rather than needing any driver updates directly. Having that kind of translation layer that games run under makes linux a bit different than windows, in both good and bad ways.

I’m aware of translator bugs, I specifically mentioned driver bugs. I’ve submitted a few bugs myself to Dxvk/vkd3d-proton. Some of them ended up driver bugs. As I mentioned in my first post updating mesa usually requires a third party repo.

[user1]

Gross misconception? I can understand if you play older titles sure that can get you by but new titles require driver updates to address driver bugs/performance issues. Especially if a title utilizes any of the new Vulkan extensions. Windows has game ready drivers for this reason. Doubt that will magically change on Linux for new titles.

For example when I had my Radeon VII I had to update my Mesa driver to version 19.3 to easily enable the ACO compiler:

https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/19.3.0.html

Just noticed I switched from AMD to Nvidia in 2020, after looking at this driver release.

Well, with open source drivers the user mode drivers (Mesa) are not tied to the kernel mode driver (AMDGPU), hence I don't see the issue with updating Mesa drivers. I mean on Ubuntu you have the excellent Kisak Mesa ppa that ships the latest stable Mesa + LLVM, while on Fedora or rolling release distros Mesa is pretty much always up to date anyway. When it comes to the kernel mode driver which is part of the Linux kernel, then yeah, there might be cases when you need the latest kernel that your distro currently doesn't ship. But again, it's something you have to do only if your hardware was released just recently. In my previous comment I was talking only about the kernel mode driver. When it comes to game optimizations or general driver optimizations, that's only what happens in Mesa, which again, is not problematic to keep up to date unlike the kernel driver.

[drakonas777]

No surprise, NVIDIA’s proprietary driver stack performs great. Switched from AMD to Nvidia in 2018 and haven’t had any issues. Not having to rely on third party repositories or using a bleeding edge kernel to upgrade the graphics driver has definitely improved my system’s stability.

I switched from NVIDIA to AMD GPU because of tearing and remote desktop stuttering issues. I really don't care if that was because of NVIDIA drivers, or some stock mis-configuration or whatever else in the distribution, but for me out-of-the-box Intel/AMD GPU experience in Linux is light-years ahead NVIDIA one.

[theriddick]

I can't get the nvidia drivers to work under Wayland due to a bug that causes them to flip out when you relog with a screen set to above 75hz. You can run above that within the session but not able to relog until you set it back to 75. System locks up too. Nasty.

[lowflyer]

No surprise, NVIDIA’s proprietary driver stack performs great. Switched from AMD to Nvidia in 2018 and haven’t had any issues. Not having to rely on third party repositories or using a bleeding edge kernel to upgrade the graphics driver has definitely improved my system’s stability.

I guess you're on *buntu which has proprietary drivers accessible. But on nearly every other distro you get Nvidia's drivers via third party repos.

This is just my experience: I had to replace a graphics card, but only a matching form-factor Nvidia card was available. I found out later that the proprietary drivers supporting that card were no longer available in the *buntu repositories. I don't know about your financial status, but I'm not willing to pay for a new greenish card every few months.