it is better to go with AMD because AMD drivers are built into the iso and less headache for gaming
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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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’m glad you mentioned knowing how to fix them. My server has hosted Nvidia GPUs for 15 odd years now, working great, and has remained stable through updates by some miracle.
Getting it set up was a nightmare back then though, do not recommend for the faint of heart.
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…
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.
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
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.
That is correct in my case, startedwith linux earlier this year. Will be switching to AMD for the next upgrade.
I did this.
From:
Intel i7 14700K + 3080 TI
To:
Ryzen 7700X + RX 7900 XTX.
The difference on Wayland is very big.
Did you see any performance change because that setup seems pretty equivalent to me
The 7900XTX has 24 gigabytes of video memory vs. the 3080 Ti's 12. That's a big difference...
Here's a couple Linux benchmarks by phoronix (don't take this as literal game performance, rather as relative performance between different cards): https://www.phoronix.com/review/rx7900xt-rx7900xtx-linux/6.
As you can see, the 7900XTX performs much better.
You’re misinformed, mostly.
NVIDIA had driver issues, incompatibility with gamescope (which was required for HDR) and a few instances of bugs, in WINE/proton, that caused performance problems in specific games/configurations.
Now, the driver issues for the mainline cards (the most common ones on Steam’s hardware survey) are about the same frequency as AMD hardware and we use Wayland’s native HDR, so gamescope isn’t a concern.
I’ve been using NVIDIA on Linux for 2 years now and I have never seen anything like a 30% performance reduction on any game, and I can also run local AI with acceleration.
As long as you’re using current hardware then you’re fine. If your graphics card was released 2 days ago, or is from the ‘00s then you may experience issues but otherwise NVIDIA cards work just fine.
So are you saying that those are false claims?
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207
Sorry the Reddit links: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nr4tva/does_the_nvidia_dx12_bug_20ish_performance_loss/
As you can see people report this from 2 years ago and also 14 days ago.
There isn’t a global 30% performance loss. There are specific games/configurations that have performance issues and bugs, but it isn’t all games.
For example, there is a current bug, if you’re using some features in VKD3D(like ray tracing) which NVIDIA has identified and is creating a fix. The problem isn’t Linux specific, if you use VKD3D on Windows it also has this problem.
The second Reddit link is a user confusing a Baldur’s Gate 3 bug, where vulkan was implemented in a buggy way, with a performance problem.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux. The social media meme “NVIDIA sucks on Linux” is based on old issues when NVIDIA cards had bugs that broadly affected games and other software to the point where it required a lot of effort (like patching your own software using git).
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues. The strongest reason to use NVIDIA over AMD would be if you used CUDA to run local AI. AMD doesn’t work with CUDA and the projects that fix this are in the alpha stages.
Gaming-wise, unless you play video games by staring at MangoHUD and comparing your historical frame-time graphs across multiple OSs, it works just fine.
There isn’t a global 30% performance loss. There are specific games/configurations that have performance issues and bugs, but it isn’t all games.
That was not what I said. I don't recall saying that there is a global 30% performance loss. I'm sorry if I gave margin for that interpretation.
There are always bugs and performance issues that appear and get fixed, that’s the nature of Linux.
This one in particular seem to be taking some time for Nvidia to fix.
This is not the case now, NVIDIA works without major issues.
I don't think I was implying that it doesn't work. My point is that for certain games that relies on certain technologies the Nvidia drivers are not optimized to reach Windows level or even AMD level on Linux for equivalents cards. It may worth reviewing the Nvidia forum link that I posted first.
I still give the benefit of the doubt that I may be missing something and need to learn better something although I'm not following your reasoning completely.
Finally, I just want to also point that I don't have strings attached to any GPU maker. I wish we had more options but it sounds that if we want something reasonable with good open source driver support for many different types of combinations of games, hardware and technology, AMD seems our only choice in Linux given this incidental bad performance present on DX12 combined with Nvidia GPUs on Linux.