If you want to use Linux, please choose AMD. I helped install CachyOS on my sister's RTX 5080 system and its horrible. 40% performance loss. She's going back to Windows.

Two pretty massive facts for anybody trying to answer this question:

1. Since driver version 555, explicit sync has been supported. This makes a massive difference to the experience on Wayland. Most of the problems people report are for drivers earlier than this (eg. black screens and flicker).

2. Since driver version 580, NVIDIA uses Open Source modules to interact with the kernel. These are not Open Source drivers. They are the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA that should now “just work” across kernel upgrades (like AMD has forever). This solves perhaps the biggest hassle of dealing with NVIDIA on Linux.

Whether you get to enjoy these significant improvements depends on how long it takes stuff to make it to your distribution. If you are on Arch, you have this stuff today. If you are on Debian, you are still waiting (even on Debian 13).

This is not an endorsement of either distro. They are simply examples of the two extremes regarding how current the software versions are in those distros. Most other distros fall somewhere in the middle.

All this stuff will make it to all Linux users eventually. They are solved problems. Just not solved for everyone.

NVIDIA definitely dominates for specialized workloads. Look at these Blender rendering benchmarks and notice AMD doesn’t appear until page 3. Wish there were an alternative to NVIDIA Optix that were as fast for path tracing, but there unfortunately is not. Buy an AMD card if you’re just gaming, but you’re unfortunately stuck with NVIDIA if you want to do path traced rendering cost effectively:

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.5.0

Edit:

Here’s hoping AMD makes it to the first page with next generation hardware like Radiance Cores:

https://wccftech.com/amd-unveils-radiance-cores-neural-arrays-universal-compression-next-gen-rdna-gpu-architecture/

I use AMD, where ever it is possible. Simply because they support Linux. There's really no other reason needed. I don't care about CUDA or anything else, that is vaguely not relevant. I'd rather drive a medium car, that gives me freedom, than a high end car, that ties me down.

I'd say given the AMD contributions to Linux better to support them with your money instead of NVIDIA.

No, nvidia are evil unreliable pieces of shit.

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.

Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.

yes, HDMI 2.1. if you use a tv as a monitor, you won't get 4k120 with amd cards on linux because hdmi forum is assholes

no

I’d say in general, the advantages of Nvidia cards are fairly niche even on windows. Like, multi frame generation (fake frames) and upscaling are kind of questionable in terms of value add most of the time, and most people probably aren’t going to be doing any ML stuff on their computer.

AMD in general offers better performance for the money, and that’s doubly so with Nvidia’s lackluster Linux support. AMD has put the work in to get their hardware running well on Linux, both in terms of work from their own team and being collaborative with the open source community.

I can see why some people would choose Nvidia cards, but I think, even on windows, a lot of people who buy them probably would have been better off with AMD. And outside of some fringe edge cases, there is no good reason to choose them when building or buying a computer you intend to mainly run Linux on.

AMD will have superior support and better power management out of the box hands down.

Nvidia may have a minor performance improvement in some areas depending on the card, but not in a way you would care if you aren't obsessed with the technical specifics of the graphics on AAA games.

I've been on Linux as a dev and daily driver for 20 years, and Nvidia drivers are just problematic unless you know exactly how to fix them when there are issues. That's an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem. Cuda on AMD is also a thing if you want to go that route.

The choice is yours.

I think the answer is if you are shooting for the high-end. AMD is better cost / performance but NVIDIA is still unchallenged for absolute performance if budget is not a consideration.

And if you need CUDA…

No

it is better to go with AMD because AMD drivers are built into the iso and less headache for gaming

I only play older games, opensource games (like Pioneer Space Sim, Luanti), and emulate PS2 mostly (could do PS3/4 you bet) so AMD is fine for my use case and works out of the box. I know Nvidia Linux support has improved which means the latest graphics cards also pretty much work out of the box too. But by principle, I support AMD for the work they put into working on Linux.

Im putting together my new Nvidia PC build tonight. I was planning on putting bazzite on it, should I just use windows then?

Literally only CUDA. Rocm mostly works.