On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 12:36 AM Steve Litt via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
AMD cards are much better for Linux than nVidia. There's a reason Linus gave the finger to nVidia. When first assembling the computer I'm typing this on, I had an nVidia card and had all sorts of intermittent weirdness including whole system hangs. I replaced it with a Radeon and the machine's been rock solid ever since.
I've used both reasonably current (ie, still being sold) green and red cards in my systems and the drivers are pretty stable for both. The nVidia support has improved greatly over the last few years. In my experience the difference is very usage-dependent. Any use of AI -- such as a local instance of Stable Diffusion or a TTS engine -- will be many MANY times better with nVidia. Many projects hosted at HuggingFace won't support AMD at all and will be CPU-bound if that's what you have. Gaming is specific to the game -- the proprietary AMD system includes tuning for many titles and if you play something on that list you're in luck. Otherwise not sure. Anything with ray tracing will certainly be inferior on AMD. Other apps that use the GPU directly like Handbrake and OBS generally support both (tho in my experience the Handbrake AMD support is not that great). If nothing of the above is an issue AMD GPUs are generally better value, sometimes significantly so. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56