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The amdgpu driver really changes that. With NVIDIA you have to choose between an open source driver (nouveau) that has quite some problems or a proprietary driver that does not really integrate well with the rest of the platform. E.g. for a long time you could not use Wayland with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers because they had implemented a different API for device memory allocation (via EGLStreams) [1]. In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver and builds their proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on top of that.

I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems. The FirePro with the amdgpu driver on the other hand works completely flawless on my machine.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDC2016-...



> I have recently switched from an NVIDIA Quadro card to an AMD FirePro card. I use GNOME/Wayland and the difference is quite big, with NVIDIA on nouveau, there was regularly flickering (at random moments), artifacts and other problems.

nouveau was always pretty awful, but the nvidia binary drivers always Just Worked, across many models for many years, whereas with AMD it's always been a crapshoot whether a given card would work properly or not.

The binary drivers always kept up with the important things (indeed they were well ahead of AMD in terms of doing accelerated video decoding on linux via Xvmc and later vaapi, their xinerama integration was always better...). Sure, they don't support Wayland, but that's a solution in search of a problem; if and when there's actual value to be had by using it I have confidence that nvidia will support it.


Just worked? The amount of security advisories for Nvidia kernel module or Nvidia X module are staggering.

X is also insecure from the ground up, that alone is enough incentive to move away from it.


they don't support Wayland, but that's a solution in search of a problem

Not

- if you don't want any GUI application to be able to read keystrokes/mouse events/screen grabs of any other GUI application,

- if you want per-display scaling factors,

- if you want a tear-free desktop experience.


I'm currently building out a CUDA cluster and I can assure you that Nvidia drivers don't "Just Work"

If AMD is worse, they're failing to clear a pretty low bar.


I'm on 1070 for DL tasks with the proprietary driver and it segfaults cinnamon every hours, probably when the acceleration for its graphic effects kicks in. It can be restarted though. I know it is due to the driver because every time the kernel gets updated cinnamon keeps failing to restart itself until I restart the entire system. This never happened before switching from Radeon.




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