TLDR: From my experience, in 2023, the Mesa drivers with an AMD GPU provide an experience that is way better than NVIDIA with their proprietary drivers. And if you're helping a friend get into linux, and or linux gaming I think you should steer them towards an AMD GPU.
"It just works", is how I would describe my computer after making the switch to an AMD GPU.
Having migrated from Windows I came over with an NVIDIA GPU, and for a long while my experience with using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers was fine. I had started with Manjaro, then moved to EndeavourOS after getting tired of Manjaro forgetting to renew their keys. EndeavourOS was an order of magnitude better, but eventually I got tired of tending to Arch and settled onto Fedora. Everything worked well enough so when I upgraded away from a 2070 Super I sought out a 3080 Ti, and again things were smooth. Issues didn't start cropping up until I upgraded monitors.
I went from 2560x1440@144hz to 3440x1440@240hz and on Fedora running under Wayland I could only get a max of 144hz. I tried using both HDMI and Displayport and could never budge past 144hz. Another issue that arose was I would need to manually turn my monitor on before booting my computer, otherwise I would not get an image, this was also the case for waking the computer having to manually turn on the monitor. Even after a fresh install of Fedora 38 these issues persisted.
Eventually I got tired of the issues I was experiencing on Fedora and decided to just try vanilla Arch. Using archinstall I was up and running with in no time, and to my surprise I was getting 240hz under X11 and Wayland. Tearing, and stuttering on X was detracting too much from the whole experience, so naturally I wanted to use Wayland.
Having gone with Gnome the amount of work required from my end to use Wayland was just too high. Even after getting the Wayland session up and running I still noticed odd graphical glitches, with enough frequency that I couldn't just live with them.
Eventually my 7900 XTX arrived, did a clean install with archinstall, and that's that. Everything just worked out of the box. It was refreshing that config changes I made were only because I wanted to, and not to enable basic functionality.
As a nice bonus seeing Processing Vulkan Shaders has become a rare occurrence after switching.
I'm using a GTX 1080 still and looking to upgrade to an AMD card. What's a solid card I can get under $600?
edit: thanks dudes, picked up a 6700xt for $350
6700xt is very solid. I game at 1440p and as long as I don't turn ray tracing on, it runs all of my games above 60fps at max settings. Admittedly I don't play many AAA games. The most demanding game I've tried on it is probably Cyberpunk 2077.
I own a 6700xt and also play in 2k - there's a great price quality relationship with this card and it performs great. This card will absolutely do the job and way more than enough - Unless you want to experience ray-tracing or VR but also linux sadly is not the best platform for those features
Think I'll pull the trigger and get that, only $350 so it's decent. Now that I think about it, 2077 was also the last demanding game I played lol. My 1080 chugged on that. Also Gears of War it struggled. Doesn't bother me too much anymore, idc about triple A games now. Mostly getting for better Linux support.
Best bang for the buck is probably the 6700XT. It will run all the the biggest games at 1440p with decent fps. If you're at 1080p, there's nothing it can't handle. If you're looking at 4K gaming, you're going to want a bit more juice if you want good framerates.
If you're willing to buy used there are mega cards going for under 600 on most marketplaces. Surplus, and little interest from consumers have brought back cheap second hand hardware. It's really a buyers market right now.*
eh I never trust used computer parts, especially graphics cards. I always assume crypto mining.
There are people out there selling broken cards but if the mining card works then is there really any evidence that it's less performant or any more likely to fail than a lightly used gaming card?
I've almost always bought new but I'd prefer to buy used now to save money and hopefully find out if it has any coil wine. That's if used prices were any different than new (Ebay's UK used prices are dumb).