I have (had?) A win10 machine for gaming with a nvidia 1080 for the past ten years since gaming wasn’t performant enough for me on Linux. Nouveau wasn’t cutting it fps wise and the nvidia drivers were a nightmare if you dared to alt-tab or expected more than 20fps.
I bought a mid tier (radeon7600xt) from AMD and it was (I am not kidding) plug and play. And I don’t mean the Microsoft blue screen presentation plugnplay.
Natively I got performant 3d fps (glxgears must be celebrating its 100th birthdaynow) and thanks to valves wine fork it was even easier to get more demanding games up and running. Before icouldn’t even run portal.
Thank you AMD for doing something right where nvidia is obviously screwing up.
I ran, without any issue, portal 1 and 2 on an nvidia 1070 under Linux. Alt+tab and all. Great performance (well, for what the 1070 could do).
I really don’t understand the issues some people report and why I never see them with my nvidia hardware.
Same. I’ve had various AMD cards in the past and had nothing but problems with them on Linux. With Nvidias closed driver on the contrary, I’ve never had ANY problems at all. That’s why I’m using Nvidia exclusively for almost 10 years now and am very happy with their hard- and software. And I’m only running Linux, none of that Wind*ws cr*p.
Try Wayland, high refresh rate, VRR and multi-monitor.
Sure you can make it work, but depending on what you’re doing you’ll have issues. AMD mostly just works.
It’s also very convenient to have AMD support directly in the kernel, it eliminates the need for a proprietary, separate driver that might cause compatibility issues with system updates.
It might be edge cases. I’ve played games on proton just fine with my 1060 and now my 3070. Doom eternal, Tomb Raider, Hitman, Cities Skylines, Guild Wars 2, 7 Days to Die, a whole range of games.
My 960 didn’t work at all, and I had to dual boot windows to play any game. Most Linux distros didn’t boot, even.
I never managed to eliminate tearing though.