What do AMD GPUs do better than Nvidia GPUs?

[Wrinkly]

Blackscreen...

 

[Dalandius]

AMD drives put less load on the CPU than Nvidia due to Nvidia doing something in software that AMD does in hardware (scheduling I think)

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Yup it is now, but not on release.

TBF, the 6900 xt does trade blows with the 3090 though.

Although having said that, so does the 3080 ti

 

[pete910]

I'm curious, really. Are there any tasks that AMD GPUs really help with when compared to an Nvidia GPU? I'm thinking of getting the 6900XT and was wondering if there was anything that would help me make the decision? I use Linux on my computers.

What are you wanting/Planing to do would be my first question. If you require anything that needs Cuda you are going to have to go NV.

The AMD cards are literally plug n play on any distro due to their OSS drivers. Also every kernel update don't break the NV driver thus have no GUI on reboot. (OK not every update but an awful lot of them)

KDE/Gnome ect have less issues like tearing and other glitches with AMD.

Wayland is also far better supported on AMD than NV at the moment.

I will say though that a rolling distro is better for AMD in general.

Also it's a waist of time asking @LtMatt as he's as clueless with Linux as I with Windows

Traditionally I think nV has been better supported on Linux?

Prior to AMD buying ATI I would whole heatedly agree. After AMD took over and built the oss driver from scratch, No. However it did take several years to come to fruition coupled with the improvements to Mesa/RADV (openGL/Vulkan stack.)

Closed-source drivers but they always "just worked". AMD had/has open-source drivers but they sucked quite a bit. Not sure if that's changed since I was mucking about with Linux a few years ago

Just worked !!! That's so far from the truth it's laughable. I will agree 10 + years ago when AMD started the driver rewite they were mediocre performance wise .

It also must have been a good few years since you last dabbled in Linux .

 

[FoxEye]

Aye, it was yonks ago. That was my recollection from back then. Sounds like a complete reversal since then.

After trying a fair few distros over some months I gave up with it and never went back Back then it was just too damn user unfriendly. It was like going back to Dos6/Win3.1 days, the sheer amount of config files that had to be edited and the like

Had to learn some damn audio-specific scripting language just to set up my 5.1 speakers

I never really had a compelling reason to stick with it, and all the games were on Windows, so... Although I like the idea of a free and open-source OS, the familiar and comforting embrace of Windows (and those lovely games) won out in the end Of course MS will nick your best ideas as well

 

[V F]

Black screens (too soon? )

AMD have some good board partners like Sapphire that rarely make a dodgy card.

Freesync used to be more accessible, but not sure if it is now.

Sapphire were always top notch when I had them back in the ATi days.

 

[jokerguv]

Image quality. Noticed it every time I switched between Nvidia and AMD. Maybe some tweaks on Nvidia's side could be made to achieve similar result but out of the box AMD nails it IMO. Though last card I checked was 1060 so not sure whether this is sorted now.

 

[Cromulent]

What are you wanting/Planing to do would be my first question. If you require anything that needs Cuda you are going to have to go NV.

The AMD cards are literally plug n play on any distro due to their OSS drivers. Also every kernel update don't break the NV driver thus have no GUI on reboot. (OK not every update but an awful lot of them)

KDE/Gnome ect have less issues like tearing and other glitches with AMD.

Wayland is also far better supported on AMD than NV at the moment.

I will say though that a rolling distro is better for AMD in general.

Also it's a waist of time asking @LtMatt as he's as clueless with Linux as I with Windows

I want to do machine learning along with gaming on the system. It is my understanding that OpenCL is the open specification to use instead of relying on CUDA.

 

[Freddie1980]

This is really subjective but by default I've always found AMD/ATI cards to render games with a much more vibrant colour palette. You can do the same with Nvidia cards but you need to mess around with the drivers to calibrate it.

 

[Woodsta888]

Thread summary -

NOTHING

Some barrel scraping in this thread

 

[Haggisman]

AMD has a far better control panel.

Absolutely this, between my AMD desktop and Nvidia laptop, I far prefer the AMD control panel!

In the last generation they were cost for cost better for rasterisation. the 5700xt was a bargain, especially against the current pricing issues.
I had tonnes of black screen issues with mine so it was sold on, was a beast of a card though.

5700xt seemed to have loads of issues - don't know if it was hardware or drivers, but it was the most unstable card I've ever had :/

One more plus for AMD - slight performance boost if you have a new Ryzen CPU and enable SAM. Yes Nvidia can use resizable BAR, but from everything I've read, it's not as good.

 

[Orcvader]

Another thing to consider is Nvidia offers better OpenGL performance and if you're streaming, a better media encoder.

AMD does not seem interested in fixing OpenGL performance for Windows: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jqriyt/amd_please_do_something_about_the_current_opengl/

 

[Tetras]

Image quality. Noticed it every time I switched between Nvidia and AMD. Maybe some tweaks on Nvidia's side could be made to achieve similar result but out of the box AMD nails it IMO. Though last card I checked was 1060 so not sure whether this is sorted now.

If I recall correctly, pascal had some kind of compression that isn't present with turing, but it's partly down to a difference in out of the box settings.

 

[Raelgun]

Thread summary -

NOTHING

Some barrel scraping in this thread

Image quality isn't scraping the barrel, I've just got a 3070ti from a 5700xt and the image quality degradation is huge.

You have to do a lot of tweaking to recover the fidelity but amd still does this better as you can still tweak that further.

 

[Raelgun]

If I recall correctly, pascal had some kind of compression that isn't present with turing, but it's partly down to a difference in out of the box settings.

The Delta compression is a nvidia standard at this point so it's still there just isn't advertised just like global illumination.

But yes you definitely need to tweak Nvidia settings but why it's like that in the first place is a head scratcher, I almost set up a return on my 3070ti sure to how bad the image quality was.

 

[Nexus18]

On the image quality side, noticed no difference going from a vega 56 to a 3080. Make sure your displays and control panels are configured properly.

Also, Tim from hardware unboxed found no difference either.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...crete_proof_of_differences/gxl6cmo/?context=3

Tim here from Hardware Unboxed.

Part of my monitor review workflow involves testing monitors on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Two separate test systems, both running default settings in their respective control panels.

Currently the Nvidia system has an RTX 3090 and the AMD system an RX 5700 XT

I've never spotted a difference between them in color reproduction. I've measured it using my tools in the desktop, web browsers, games. Taken side by side photos and captures. Never spotted any differences. They produce identical images.

Because this comes up every so often I did look into it to see if it was worth making a video on but the conclusion was there was no difference so it wasn't worth making a video. Since I can't reproduce it I have to assume it's some sort of configuration issue.

EDIT: Back in the day I used to see this occasionally when Nvidia would accidentally default to the wrong RGB range (limited instead of full) but in this particular case apparently that is not the problem so I don't really know how in this case the difference is happening. And those limited/full range issues were a while ago, would have to be several years now

As for what amd does better:

- superior control panel (although not really a pro if you hardly ever use it....)
- radeon image sharpening, not a fan of this generally but it works very well when required for blurry TAA implementations especially with the in game overlay

 

[Raelgun]

I'd argue the default sharpness from amd processing is better then nvidia, the default configuration from Nvidia is really soft. This isn't getting settings wrong, this is literally from driver install.

 

[man_from_uncle]

One thing AMD/ATI have traditionally done well with is performance over time. On release nvidia cards often slightly beat out the AMD competition at the same price, but 5 years on and those numbers reverse. AMD seem to take longer to get their act together with drivers, but when they do you see that they age better. At least that's my experience.

 

[varkanoid]

2 pages so far and the mud slinging AMD v Nvidia has not yet happened so going well so far.

Dont forget the OP is on Linux.....

 

[Deleted member 66701]

2 pages so far and the mud slinging AMD v Nvidia has not yet happened so going well so far.

Dont forget the OP is on Linux.....

AMD owners are far to classy to stoop to the level NVIDIA owners have demonstrated in this thread