On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.

On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that's my most played game.

And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!

Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It's a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.

While that might be technically true, the kernel module is only a tiny fraction of the driver stack.

Also, I'm not interested in rewarding a company that spent decades making life difficult for open source users and developers, when there are competitors who have done far better (and have more experience) in this space.

The kernel driver is a rather small piece of the overall puzzle though, itps just the pipe that GPU commands are passed through. The bulk of the GPU driver code (and the majority of its impact on performance) is in the userspace components like the shader compiler and the OpenGL/Vulkan libraries. These are closed source.

The exception to this rule is that the kernel driver is responsible for power management and controls the GPU clocks, but as part of opening up the kernel driver NVIDIA made reclocking available for the fully open driver (nouveau/nvk) to use as well which means the performance differences between the two driver stacks are now down to optimizations.

they are open core not fully open source

nvidia has released opensource kernel level drivers

"Not every GPU is compatible with the open-source GPU kernel modules.

For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms." - developer.nvidia.com

Only 9 years after AMD, and 13 years after Linus said "fuck you Nvidia" during a talk for being such a difficult company to work with.

AMD (or anything that uses Mesa drivers really) just works out of the box. That pain is unique to NVIDIA.

They continue to be great on newer GPUs, although the first ~6-12 months might have some small bugs. I have really enjoyed my RX 7800 XT. It's working perfectly now, but I had an issue specific to newer GPUs where every other boot would fail (Arch Linux). It was a known issue and fixed in kernel 6.7.3 (I think) and issues like that seem to be rare.

I got a Radeon 7800XT in March and have had no significant issues with it on Arch Linux. The issues I have had were from running the bleeding-edge mesa-tkg-git drivers which are the pre-release development builds, and sometimes things break there (I had a weird issue where red and green got swapped in X11 apps). You have to go out of your way to run those drivers though, stick with the released version in your distro's repository and you'll be fine. I can play most games above 100Hz at decent resolution and quality. I have a 4K 144Hz monitor with Freesync but for more demanding games usually need to turn down settings a bit or use resolution upscaling like FSR. I upgraded from an Intel Arc A770 and it was a big performance increase.

Nitro is just a marketing term for their high end models, they usually have the Pulse which is the base and the Nitro(+) that has additional features like removable fans.

They cost more but they tend to have a better build quality, but the chip inside is the same.