Hi so I was wondering what gpu vendor had the best support intel, amd or nvidia In the future I wanna upgrade my mid range pc and I dual boot cachyos (arch btw) and windows 11 (to play game that don’t work on linux)
I’d say amd or intel, but intel isn’t very good for stability or price-to-performance iirc
Others have said it, AMD. Intel is weak and NVIDIA is a headache.
AMD
There is no best. Only least worst. Pick your poison:
AMD: Libre driver stack, require firmware blobs.
NVidia: Proprietary driver stack (kernel driver component slowly being opened), proprietary firmware exists in ROM on card so doesn’t need to be loaded at runtime.
Intel: Libre driver stack, same firmware issue as with NVidia, GPU performance generally sucks because iGPU constraints
I would say, in order from least-worst to most-worst:
AMD
Intel
NVidia
Others that I have considered, but are hopeless pipe dreams
Matrox - old, deprecated, dead, no longer in business?
S3 Chrome - assimilated into Centaur/VIA technologies, later bought out by Intel
Mali - don’t even kid yourself
Software rendering - you must be desperate
Aspeed and other 2D framebuffer solutions - good luck
Any and every “open source GPU” initiative - always dead in the water. NLnet recently pulled funding from LibreSOC because the lead dev spent more time begging for e-gold than doing any developmental work.
You may not have considered the Intel Arc GPUs. Basically they were bad on Windows and are slowly improving, but unsure about their state on Linux. The cards were quite bad at some point, and well worse than an experience with NVIdia, despite the libre stack.
I would say the “best” depends on goals here. I generally encourage use of AMD over NVidia, but the difference is quite small. If you’re already going with CachyOS, then you’re well beyond the skill level to be able to navigate the tiny additional complexity of an NVidia card. Just buy the best bang for buck and your use case.
As for Mali, recent kernels and Mesa versions have made significant inroads. I do believe we’ll get pretty good support for Mali by the time the Qualcomm ARM Laptops become available for Linux.
I got one machine with an amd gpu and another with an Nvidia. The amd machine is so much more comfortable to use, it’s not even funny. The amd card just keeps chugging along and doing its job without bothering me, whereas the Nvidia card keeps making me make sure the drivers are properly loaded in the first place.
I’ve never used an AMD graphics card, but I recently got into gaming in Linux with my NVidia card and this is one of the things I have to deal with.
- I want to launch a game.
- There’s a problem
- Oh are my drivers up to date?
- apt-get update & upgrade
- check driver version
- check online for latest driver
- I think flatpaks need to be updated as well? I’m new to flatpaks too.
But yeah, you gotta check all the time.
AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.
Presumably some games at some point needed the user to update the kernel for an updated AMD driver?
