Hey all! This is my first post, so I'm sorry if anything is formatted incorrectly or if this is the wrong place to ask this. Recently I've saved up enough to upgrade my graphics card ($350 budget). I've heard great things about amd on linux and appreciate open source drivers so as to not be at the mercy of nvidia. My first choice of graphics card was a 6700xt, but then I heard that nvidia had significantly higher performance in terms of workstation tasks (not to mention the benefits of cuda and nvenc) and have been looking into a 3060 or 3060 ti. I do a bit of gaming in my free time, but its not my top priority, and I can almost guarantee that any option in this price range will be more than enough for the games I play. Ultimately my questions come down to:
- Would nvida or amd provide more raw performance on linux for my price range?
- Which would be better for productivity cuda encoding etc. (I mainly use blender, freecad, and solidworks, but I appreciate having extra features for any software that I may use in the future).
- What option would work best after a few years? (I've seen amd increase rheir performance with driver updates before, but the nvk driver also looks promising. I also host some servers and tend to cycle my componenta from my main system into my proxmox cluster).
Also a bit more details to hopefully help with any missing info: My current system is a Ryzen 7 3700x, gtx 1050 ti, 32gb ram, 850 watt psu, and nvme ssd. I've only ever used nvidia cards, but amd looks like a great alternative. As another side note, if there's any way to run cuda apps on amd I plan on running my new gpu alongside my old one so nvenc is not too much of a concern.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or ideas!
Edit 1: thanks so much for all of the feedback! I'm not going to purchase a gpu quite yet but probably in a few weeks. First I'll be testing wayland with my 1050 ti and just researching how much I need each feature of each gpu. Thanks again for all of your feedback, I'll update the post when I do order said gpu.
Edit 2: I made an interesting decision and actually got the arc a770. I'd be happy to discuss exactly why, and some of the pros and cons so far, but I do plan on eventually compiling a more in depth review somewhere sometime.
"Raw" performance is going to be similar.
For Blender you definitely want Nvidia.
For games you can go either way, especially if it's not your main goal.
AMD being open source is a mixed bag and not as clear-cut as it should be. They're notorious for being slow to fix bugs for example so for any card you're going to have to check how recent it is, the more recent the more bugs still around. (Yes being open source means anybody can write bug fixes, but they can't force AMD to get off their ass and test and accept the fixes...) The drivers being open does make some interesting things possible but not enough that you're going to see a huge difference in every day use.
Since it's your potentially first AMD card after using only Nvidia I strongly urge you (if you get AMD) to buy from somewhere with a good return policy, test everything, and return if something is not ok.
At my last attempt to switch to AMD a couple of years ago I ran into a bug that prevented my monitors from going to sleep, to give you an example. I know it's anecdotal and a poor sample of one card model on one particular distro etc. but it is the kind of stuff that happens.
Other than that you're going to see a lot of opinionated discussions about AMD bring open source vs Nvidia refusing to, which often veer into ideology. Don't get drawn into that, get a card that's good for you and test it thoroughly.
I completely agree that I should test it and do more research. Fortunately, a friend of mine has the 6700xt so I've asked him to test some of my most important softwares out on it (meshroom, blender, freecad). I also have said open source ideology, but I've got the mindset of if I get this gpu and support is dropped for it in say 10 years, how usable will it be at that point?