I'm sure many people under (financial) stress are acting as (inadvertent) testers for Arc GPUs right now.

At least I they accelerate AV1 encoding!

I currently have an Arc A770 LE, haven’t benchmarked it under Linux but have done plenty of Blender renders under GPU compute as well as played plenty of games and so far haven’t experienced any issues under the Mesa driver

There's a wide range of options to go against NVIDIA when using Linux:

• Not Open Source
• Calls home to momma (often) with more info than it strictly needs- though some would put this in the column of win for faster reponse to fixes
• Constant game of whack a mole with drivers, versions, updates breaking things
• Ease of use
• WAY overpriced (let's call AMD at least overpriced though)

I decided to go AMD 6+ years ago, and gaming is consistently good, I have spent a total of zero time fucking with drivers, and appreciate that AMD invests in the community vs. just profiting from it and the bang for the buck is a nice addition.

I tell everyone I know considering a gaming rig build to just go AMD - near same performance, better pricing, better drivers and company support / policies

Used Nvidia for years, got tired of it. I used to keep a list of all the problems but I got tired of posting it.

Off the top of my head, gaming at all on Nvidia used to break KDE on X if you disabled the compositor for performance, the whole UI would visually freeze. FFXIV and WoW would crash constantly until DXVK put in special handling for the Nvidia driver. Wayland still has issues which means users with mixed refresh rates or VRR have to choose what features to sacrifice. Optimus laptop graphics switching support is a goddamn joke on Linux, only supported on a couple generations and it barely works there. Video hardware acceleration never worked on Firefox, no idea if it does now.

I installed an AMD GPU about a year ago and I've literally not thought about it once since. It just works, it doesn't cause problems, I don't have to do anything with drivers. I'm never gonna go back unless they get a fully functional open source driver stack.

I'm on X and every time I launch a game I haven't played in a while, there's a high chance that it will have low FPS, stutter or just straight up won't work anymore. This isn't about starfield, it happens with every single game I play. Titanfall 2 is a recent example. It runs better on my steam deck than it does on my PC with a 1070 Ti. It used to run well about a year ago.

If the proton version didn't change, the issue is always the nvidia driver. But since I don't know when it broke, I have to try a few different versions to find one that works well with that game, which might break others.

It was a similar story on windows, I used to just not update the driver unless I absolutely had to.

It's been a while since I had an AMD card, but there was only one time when I saw a driver regression and my friends with AMD cards also don't have any issues. They're on windows, but I assume that this aspect transfers to linux with AMD just like it does for nvidia.