Are they some graphic card benchmark for linux environment ? From my windows experience, drivers are important, and often underestimate. My linux gaming experience is very bad, lots of my game are unstable, and others use a lot more resources than with windows. However, when I ask people, some of them have no issue at all, even with a similar environment (Debian + Steam). I may consider buy specific graphic card to stay on linux, but I couldn’t find any clue to know which one are more adapted.
Thx for your leads !
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I like the Voodoo 2 but then again I play Quake and MDK
Any relatively modern AMD card should be fine. Also, protondb.com is your friend.
Even on nvidia, it’s been near perfect for me. I’ve heard that some higher-end features are missing, but with a 1080ti and the 550.78 driver, I really can’t complain for my own use
Worry less about benchmarks, and more about stability, compatibility, configurability, and sanity. Amd should be your first choice, then Intel Arc (may see some performance issues, but easier than Nvidia at this point), then Nvidia as an absolute last resort.
AMD and Intel open large parts of their drivers to be included in the mainline kernels releases and tertiary support packages which drive graphics in Linux, so any fully featured kernel will support either right out of the box, with no fiddling needed. You can tweak the drivers and overclock stuff as well if that’s your jam.
Nvidia doesn’t do any of this, and only allows individual installs of it’s proprietary driver on a per-kernel basis. To simplify, you’ll have issues getting it running under almost any conditions aside from a very Vanilla LTS install of a distro from a year ago unless you get REALLY good at doing the dance with their terrible package management issues and DKMS compilation craziness.
Go AMD. The open-source drivers already provide the best performance compared to the closed-source ones, and are included in the kernel and Mesa, which means the cards will work out of the box. For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho. For example, Fedora is a very good mix between working OOTB, ease of use and bleeding-edge packages.
nVidia is… difficult. The open-source drivers are getting better but are still way behind closed-source drivers, and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk. Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.
Intel has a good track record with iGPUs so discrete cards should be as trivial to use as AMD ones, if more at the entry-level performance-wise.
Second for AMD. Team Red is bringing it right now anyway, the only card that doesn’t have an AMD equivalent is the 4090, anything else you can get an AMD equivalent for basically half the price. I run the 7900XTX and I can’t find anything that stalls this card.
Caveats, if you want to do AI/ML stuff, NVidia is the way to go. Ray tracing is also about a generation behind, but it’s not really noticeable to me. Instead of 4000 series ray tracing you get 3000 series ray tracing (roughly). Even with those caveats, it’s the best card I’ve ever owned.
