this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I've been using Nvidia cards on Linux for many years and never had issues. I did have issues with the laptop cards (Optimus switching), but on the desktop it was always flawless for me.
I mean, they work. But the drivers aren’t as feature complete as AMD or intel. Wayland support was a strict no until very recently and gamescope support is still very hit n miss and they are less stable than their competition. They’re completely useable though. My 1650 runs well, most of the time.
When I was in the market for a new card 2 years ago I looked into AMD, but learned that they don't work as well as Nvidia for GPU passthrough to VMs, which I need to work. I'd love to switch because Nvidia is a shit company, but AMD GPU's just don't work for my use case.
I'm curious though because I don't know what I'm missing. What are the features in AMD drivers that make it more complete?
As I said, AMD works much better with wayland and gamescope, thus has, for example, HDR and VRR support. Besides that, their Linux drivers are open source and more stable.
But to my knowledge, AMD GPUs pass through just fine to VMs? What was your problem with them?
Do many distros use Wayland now? I use Kubuntu and it doesn't, so that probably explains why I never ran into any issue with that. Gamescope looks like some Wayland tool too from what I see. I don't have an HDR monitor either. Looks like good stuff, that I just never needed so never noticed it not working.
I asked on the VFIO subreddit back then and was told AMD cards have a bug where you have to restart the PC to switch between host and VM (which makes it no better than dualbooting since you have to restart anyway), this was not the case on Nvidia.
So now that Nvidia has open source drivers and works on Wayland, what's the difference? Just gamescope?
I guess you aren’t using Wayland. It’s abysmal with Wayland. Especially electron apps. They just flicker and crash.
No, I'm on Kubuntu, it doesn't use Wayland.
Pretty sure Wayland is installed by default and maybe even enabled by default on new installs.
On the login screen there should be a button to switch between x11 and Wayland.
Oh yeah there is a button to switch on the login screen, but X11 is the default and I never saw a reason to switch the default.
Personally, I wouldn't say "it doesn't use Wayland" when it absolutely can with a single mouse click and it works great.
Yes, it can, and by default it doesn't use it.