Are they some graphic card benchmark for linux environment ? From my windows experience, drivers are important, and often underestimate. My linux gaming experience is very bad, lots of my game are unstable, and others use a lot more resources than with windows. However, when I ask people, some of them have no issue at all, even with a similar environment (Debian + Steam). I may consider buy specific graphic card to stay on linux, but I couldn’t find any clue to know which one are more adapted.
Thx for your leads !
You must log in or register to comment.
I like the Voodoo 2 but then again I play Quake and MDK
Any relatively modern AMD card should be fine. Also, protondb.com is your friend.
Go AMD. The open-source drivers already provide the best performance compared to the closed-source ones, and are included in the kernel and Mesa, which means the cards will work out of the box. For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho. For example, Fedora is a very good mix between working OOTB, ease of use and bleeding-edge packages.
nVidia is… difficult. The open-source drivers are getting better but are still way behind closed-source drivers, and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk. Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.
Intel has a good track record with iGPUs so discrete cards should be as trivial to use as AMD ones, if more at the entry-level performance-wise.
Second for AMD. Team Red is bringing it right now anyway, the only card that doesn’t have an AMD equivalent is the 4090, anything else you can get an AMD equivalent for basically half the price. I run the 7900XTX and I can’t find anything that stalls this card.
Caveats, if you want to do AI/ML stuff, NVidia is the way to go. Ray tracing is also about a generation behind, but it’s not really noticeable to me. Instead of 4000 series ray tracing you get 3000 series ray tracing (roughly). Even with those caveats, it’s the best card I’ve ever owned.
Worry less about benchmarks, and more about stability, compatibility, configurability, and sanity. Amd should be your first choice, then Intel Arc (may see some performance issues, but easier than Nvidia at this point), then Nvidia as an absolute last resort.
AMD and Intel open large parts of their drivers to be included in the mainline kernels releases and tertiary support packages which drive graphics in Linux, so any fully featured kernel will support either right out of the box, with no fiddling needed. You can tweak the drivers and overclock stuff as well if that’s your jam.
Nvidia doesn’t do any of this, and only allows individual installs of it’s proprietary driver on a per-kernel basis. To simplify, you’ll have issues getting it running under almost any conditions aside from a very Vanilla LTS install of a distro from a year ago unless you get REALLY good at doing the dance with their terrible package management issues and DKMS compilation craziness.
Even on nvidia, it’s been near perfect for me. I’ve heard that some higher-end features are missing, but with a 1080ti and the 550.78 driver, I really can’t complain for my own use
Which GPU do you have? Which drivers are you using? are you sure you’re using those drivers and they’re not just installed but unused? My first guess is that you have an Nvidia and are using open source drivers (nouveau).
Some performance difference is expected, after all most games are being run through a compatibility layer, and many others were ported as a second thought so they’re not optimized on the same level. Also note that lots of us don’t use Windows, so we’re not comparing experiences, if it runs at an acceptable frame rate with an acceptable graphics settings for what I would expect the GPU to be capable of, then I don’t bother benchmarking it.
Another consideration is whether they are plugged into the graphics card. Common performance “problems” arise when somebody tries to plug into the video-out on the motherboard, so they could be accidentally forcing the use of the iGPU, if present.
If using a somewhat modern distro, this isn’t an issue anymore (unless you run a really old OpenGL game).
I run my PC in this way with little to no performance degradation: monitors go to my motherboard (r5 2400g CPU with vega11 iGPU) and games use my RX 5700XT without having to do anything at all… Pretty smart handling tbh
That is, because supposedly that limitation still affects Windows. Do you use
supergfxctl?I’m running vanilla Fedora 40. Haven’t installed that, and just checked and it’s not even on fedora’s repos
I just remembered that that package isn’t compatible with Plasma 6 (yet), so maybe it got dropped from the official repos when they officially released 40.
