Debating upgrading from RTX 2080 > RX 7900 GRE to please my driver making overlords, thoughts?
So NVIDIA just doesn't cut it on Linux/proton I've come to learn. Looking at the best bang//buck, it this the AMD card people are flocking to? 7800 XT maybe?
I've got a 7800XT now and I moved from a 1070 and I've been happy with it overall. I'm on Fedora and I bought the 7800 kinda close to launch, so I went through some issues that seem to have been solved by now. Nothing that really made me go "gee I wish I hadn't switched".
I don't do anything related to streaming, or machine learning, so I can't really speak to it's ability with those, but gaming has been stable, and, aside from a now solved problem with rocm, it works fine with Blender cycles (at least on Fedora 40). Davinci Resolve has worked fine too. On launch, there wasn't VAAPI support for AV1, but that works just fine for me now. (VAAPI is the open source interface for GPU video acceleration).
Currently, I'd say the experience is perfectly fine.
I cannot speak for this card itself, but moving from Nvidia to AMD made my life so much easier. Wayland works a treat, and updates never leave me with a black screen from silly diver issues. However anything for local llms is a massive pain in the ass to use compared to Nvdias cuda, rocm is quite half-baked.
I'll definitely be keeping my nvidia card for ai/ml /cuda purposes. It'll live in a dual boot box for windows gaming when necessary (bigscreen beyond, for now). II am curious to see what 16gb of amd vram will let me get up to anyway.
IMO, intel has underrated linux drivers. You get solid 3d, codecs, compute, etc. ootb. Assuming your distro supports it. You may be looking into something higher end, though.
I daily drive arc on linux. They're not as bad as people say. Not fully there, but opencl support requires one package that is in most distros repos, same for video. Not saying they're perfect, or even better than amd, but they are a lot better than people seem to think.
I switched from Nvidia for amd for the same reason: "and is better on Linux".
In my experience you are just making different tradeoffs. I use pop so your mileage may vary but Nvidia was easy to use and upgrade. It's not nearly as bad as people let on.
AMD on the other hand isn't as seamless as people let on. And the open source drivers, while awesome, don't let you take advantage of the codecs for video streaming or even alot of the AI ML stuff, so you switch to the proprietary drivers and they are slightly buggy.
I wish I kept my 3070ti over the 6900xt.
Unless they figure out a way to let me use av1 or rocm more easily then my next card will be Nvidia again.
I am all AMD both PC (currently Windows but have used Linux on systems with AMD and Nvidia over the years) and Steam Deck (of course). AMD is overall easier. That being said, Nvidia is supposedly in process of making opensource drivers. I believe they are going to be focusing on their newer cards. So it might be worth researching into any recent news on their progress. Always good to have options if you get a better deal on one vs another.
Worth noting that Nvidia only intends to open source the kernel driver. This is only half the driver, as a userspace blob will still be required, and that will remain closed and proprietary.
In my experience, as a nongamer just laptop user, Intel is way more stable than AMD too. Might consider an Intel GPU? But I only know the integrated ones on Laptops, which work really well