• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

AMD or Nvidia for Linux & Windows

Fourstar

Fourstar

Fourstar

Associate
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
2,177
Location
London
I've been looking for a new graphics card around £200. The GeForce 1660 Super and the Radeon 5500 XT fit the bill but they both seem to have driver problems. Under Linux the 1660 is supposed to be a ballache to get working and has problems with screen tearing and multi monitor. 5500 isn't supported in released kernels with 5.5 being a recommendation and 5.6 suggested to people with problems. Windows seems better but I keep reading about the blank screen bug affecting the Radeons.

I'm not sure if these are widespread problems or if they're fixed. I can't find that much info online with success stories. Anyone running a newest gen under Linux? How have you found it?

Because of this I've been thinking about a last gen 590 or second hand Vega 56 but I'm being put off by the power consumption. My computer room gets quite warm in the summer and a 100W+ extra power under load is a lot.
 
It's a toss-up. You'll find AMD easier overall due to the fact their open source driver is excellent and works well for Vulkan, and hardware acceleration for apps/browsers/video. It's literally baked into the kernel so you can just boot any distro and the graphics will work perfectly.

On the other hand, Nvidia's binary/proprietary driver is better than AMD's, and they're finally adding things like VP9 support (i.e. YouTube) and such in hardware. At the moment both Nvidia and AMD 'only' support x264, requiring you to use H264ify (browser extension) to force YouTube to that codec to get accelerated playback. On the majority of distros the binary/proprietary Nvidia driver is either a boot option, or a one-click install. Then there's the CUDA/Tensorflow vs ROCM/OpenCL, if that's important to you. I'd personally either hit out the extra £80-90 and go 2060, or as you said get the Vega 56.

My Vega 56 was £230 new on sale (OcUK), which for the perf is an absolute bargain. It runs undervolted and overclocked (see sig), and pulls anything between 3W (browsing) to 160-180W (full load). Hardly massive for the power. It bobs between 1080 and 1070Ti levels in tests.
 
Thanks for your insights. Your info about HW video decoding sent me down the rabbit hole and I discovered the HW x265 encoding on Turing based Nvidia cards reportedly comes close to SW for quality and is much faster in speed. I've got a huge pile of DVDs I've always intended to rip and being stuck at home is a good motivation to do it.

I'm likely to go the Nvidia route maybe the 2060.
 
As I said, be warned that hardware acceleration/decoding on Linux is flaky and in its infancy. Chromium-vaapi will work fairly reliably on either brands' card (using H264 on YouTube etc), and video players like mpv can take advantage more properly.

Things like hardware decode of x265, VP9, and so on are much more convoluted and basically don't work atm. You can still decode in software though obviously, but this will use way more CPU. Linux is fantastic but for a lot of media stuff it's behind (mostly due to cruddy driver support and closed APIs that OEMs like AMD and Nvidia won't share, tbf).
 
I should have said, I realise none of the HW encoders are likely to work under Linux! If I find the HW encoder to be good I can leave the machine running windows overnight.

My venerable, and soon to be retired, Phenom II x6 manages youtube vp9 at 1440p without problems (4K stutters). While HW acceleration would be nice I can certainly live without it :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom