That's the thing with AMD drivers, they're the damn near perfect software. Doing lots of stuff yet you'd never know it's there. It stays nicely out of the user's way, you don't even have to think about installing them and shit just works
Then there are the Nvidia drivers
I think it's more of a
Open drivers vs proprietary drivers
Intel drivers:
I need an intel driver to turn the fucking useless onboard graphics off. for debian. any tips?
Never had an issue with my Nvidia card. OBS can use the hardware encoder out of the box. Just a few weeks ago upgraded to a AMD card and had to set some "advanced" settings in OBS to do the same. Really happy overall, but after seeing this meme for years I expected rainbows and sunshine but was unpleasantly surprised in that regard.
When you want to do GPU processing for AI, crypto, video editing, etc, though, this gets reversed.
Getting Cuda working on Linux with an nvidia card is relatively painless. Just a few well-documented commands, worked on the first try.
I could never get AMD's equivalent to work on Linux, though, and it led me down a horrible rabbit-hole of trying a dozen different driver versions from a dozen different places, all with their own unique and quirky ways of installing... And it still never did work.
ROCM is pretty simple. It's just no where near as robust and supported as Cuda.
Thats just poor distro support, kind of like CUDA in the past.. ROCM should "just work" if it's shipped right. But it's not really a priority with maintainers.
Now, if you're trying to run CUDA stuff with ROCM, that's a whole different story. The bast majority of GPU software has extremely poor ROCM support compared to CUDA, and some of this is definitely from AMD footgunning.
For me it was deadsimple once i tried setting it up with nix, granted you need to learn a little about nix so maybe that cancels it out a bit lol.
I'm running wayland with nvidia-open and nvidia-utils packages, and have never encountered any driver issues in both graphics and compute.
The only time I've ever really had issues with Nvidia drivers is when installing the meta package for CUDA (because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok), or with laptops and hybrid graphics.
But the laptop issue is almost completely gone with newer distros like Bazzite.
because it tends to include a previous version of the driver, which causes install/uninstall havok
To be fair, this is a packaging/distro problem, as CUDA should always work (and be kept in sync with) the newest graphics driver.
ROCM and OpenVINO (AMD and Intel) are even more of a pain, actually.
You mean all three apps that support waylamd are working? Wow. At the same time?
15 years ago this was true lol
3 years ago this was true. Not sure if nvidia works properly with wayland even now, though at least the trend is different now
It has no issues, NVIDIA just works these days (if you use a distro where you can choose to use proprietary drivers for it during installation)
I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.
Eh. I had issues with Nvidia drivers like 5 years ago. Still, a lot more stable today
i'd argue it was the opposite back then. i have PTSD from fglrx
i wish i could go to an amd card but i just upgraded my video card (geforce rtx 4060 ti) like 3 months before i decided to move to linux :(
Jo, no problem! Just use the proprietary drivers and vulcan, cuda etc. Just works
Especially with a recent card, like a 4060. Problematic are only the cards which are considered legacy by nvidia (I think older than the GTX 900 series), because they do not update their drivers for newer kernels. In these cases resorting to nouveau (in-kernel driver for nvidia cards) is your best bet, but you will not use the card’s full potential.
Edit: One can of course use proprietary drivers with legacy cards if you use a distro in a legacy kernel. But having old kernel then comes with less compatibility to other devices, as backports generally take their time.
On one hand, setting up complicated stuff is a challenge and also fun.
On the other hand, I don't wanna pay a company doing propreitery stuff.
On the other feet, prices are increasing due to chatbot girlfriend arms race between richest dudes on earth; are GPUs really even worth it anymore?
A decade ago it used to be opposite. How far Nvidia has fallen.
Considering their stock price has grown by 27,557% in those 10 years, I don't think too many people at the company are concerned with their "falling"
https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/NVDA/performance/total-return
It sucks that they abandoned us, and it's awful that they're a huge part of the AI bubble,. But, this is like an artist who used to play on Tuesday evenings at your local live music venues "selling out" and now playing stadiums.
nvidia drivers are all dependant on who is implementing them
I only ever have problems if the kernel is updated without the drivers, because I somehow updated before the video driver was included
this is my experience for over 10 years now on Arch
Yeah, have it setup in nix to just work and haven't had issues in years. When I ran arch (btw) I was routinely recovering my system from bad updates
how often did you update? I run pacman a couple times a month but rarely at the beginning of the week or on weekends. I've only had three or four OMG what just happened reboots. And twice it was something that needed the front page of the arch webpage calling out the fix, I know I should look there more often but I only ever do when it's so bad I can't make heads or tails of it
I usually updated a couple times a week and got bit around once a year over the course of probably 8 years running arch
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
sudo in Windows.Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.