More information available on NVIDIA.com
I tried Linux on my desktop end of last year (like I always did on about a yearly basis) and decided that if I was gonna make the switch, I needed an AMD card. NVIDIA + Wayland had a lot of flickering issues and whatnot, but I didn’t want to use X11 because Wayland has way better support for multi-monitor with different refresh rates and also VRR.
So, I sold my RTX 3080 and got a Radeon 7800 XT and switched to Linux on my main desktop full-time January 1st. A few months later and NVIDIA finally decides to stop fucking around and properly improve their Linux driver. Could’ve saved a few bucks there (sold the 3080 for like 350,-€ to a friend and got the 7800 XT for like 550,-€, and the 7800 XT is pretty much in the same performance ballpark, so I spent 200,-€ on better compatibility/less pain).
Good to know that NVIDIA will be an option for me for a GPU upgrade in the future. It’s always good to have more choice. While my experience with AMD Radeon under Linux was okay, it wasn’t really perfect either. I had the odd crash here and there with kernel versions from earlier in the year (6.6), 6.7 had black screen issues with RDNA3 (maybe RDNA2 as well) after standby and hot restarts (fixed in 6.7.4 or 6.7.5 iirc), and ever since 6.7 I have stability issues with enabled VRR and multi-monitor as well, unless I force the memory clock to stay at a higher frequency. Then there’s also this issue that just got fixed with 6.10 it seems.
So if NVIDIA really ups their game now and consistently improves their Linux driver, I could see myself going NVIDIA again. I’m also excited to see what Intel has in store though.
Honestly don’t feel too bad. I JUST tried switching full time to Debian bookworm with a 3070ti and I had the EXACT problems you describe. I tried built in drivers. Debian Nvidia drivers. Nvidia drivers straight from Nvidia, nothing would work. Was getting like 60 fps in overwatch and it would dip to 20 frames constantly. It was unplayable. I couldn’t even get my 4 monitors connected at one time no matter what I tried. Ended up going back to windows 11 with the decrappifier unattend file. Back to 170 frames easy. I am convinced the only way to dodge this is with an AMD card. My next computer will be AMD graphics for sure so I can finally switch for good. Sorry about the long rant but I was so frustrated with it! Don’t ever doubt yourself and swapping to the AMD card! Lol.
I’m not regretting the switch, no worries :). Overall the Radeon 7800 XT is still a great card, it’s a decent step up in terms of efficiency compared to the RTX 3080 as well and the PowerColor Hellhound model I got is the first card I ever had (well, with active cooling at least) where I actually agree with the reviews that the card stays pretty quiet even under load.
I also know how to work around each problem: KDE has a built-in workaround for the cursor stutters (as of version 6.something) and in GNOME you can disable hardware cursor which can decrease performance, but so far I haven’t really noticed anything. The artifacting and eventual crashing after standby with enabled VRR can be worked around by reconfiguring any display: I usually change the refresh rate of my second display between 144 and 165 hertz. The frequency of random crashes decreased a lot with newer kernel versions, and I’m not even sure if the crashes I had in KDE 6/6.1 were caused by the AMD driver or by KDE - which seems quite a bit more moody to me than the more mature KDE 5. That’s also why I’m trying GNOME now (which I actually enjoy using way more than I thought). A few days ago AV1 decoding on AMD was borked in Mesa 24.1.something, but was hotfixed a few days later. My self-compiled kernel 6.10 refused to boot with errors related to a network card, but I’ll check it out again as soon as Fedora releases their official test build (potentially this weekend) and will report the bug should it still occur. As soon as 6.10 is working, that’s one less workaround for me to worry about (unless that fix somehow doesn’t work for me).
My comment was more about the fact that I’m happy NVIDIA starts taking Linux serious (again). It’s probably not quite there yet, but NVIDIA seems to be committed to delivering a good Linux driver now and their latest releases each brought big improvements. There still seem to be some bigger issues (like the one you described), but now I’d assume we’ll get there sooner rather than later.
I also have a 3080 and have been considering switching to AMD, but with the problems you describe. Maybe, I’ll give Intel’s offerings a shot assuming the graphics cards don’t suffer the same way their cpu’s are right now.
FPS is double of what it was on Windows on the same machine.
I honestly don’t believe you.
NVIDIA’s user-space components remain the same and are closed-source, but great to see the NVIDIA open-source kernel driver bits being mature enough to now be preferred over the proprietary ones on supported GPUs.
How is it open source? In the history of the whole repository, there were 11 merged PRs in 2022 (when the project began), and no merged PRs after, even though lots of PRs have been submitted since then. There has never been an issue-fixing PR merged, and no issues or PRs are submitted by the maintainers of the project.
All of their commits are tagged versions, none of which tell you in words what they did or what changed, it’s clear that they still do their actual development internally, and the GitHub repository does not contain that incremental work. Because the commits are releases only, there are only 65 commits on the main branch from May 2022 to the latest commit/release 4 days ago.
so NVIDIA,
I tried the new installer out the other day to see if it made ALVR more stable for doing Steam VR with my Quest 3…
The installer was very user friendly, and ALVR is way more stable now.
I’m pretty happy, the process to install nvidia drivers now can be done in a single one liner command, which is ideal.
