I don’t want any proprietary drivers

So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.

The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.

FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.

Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.

if you are on linux AMD is the better choice, period.

don’t get me wrong nvidia will work relatively well, ive ran it before on linux and its actually improving. but it isnt worth the pricetag to have tons of small issues everywhere.

If you don’t want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.

As for my experience, I’ve had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.

I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I’ve never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.

I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.

In my experience older nvidia cards (~5 years old +) work fine, newer ones are very hit-or-miss
Amd cards of any age work pretty much perfectly as far as I can tell

Though if the drivers not being proprietary is a hard line for you then amd is your only option really

If you’re unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel is your friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.

Honestly even on Windows I preferred AMD’s software suite compared to Nvidia control panel and GeForce Experience. Currently using a 7900XTX and pretty happy with it. Also I missed Radeon Chill when I was on Nvidia, didn’t expect to care about that at all, but I love it.

Do you play a lot of games with ray tracing, or do you care about that stuff? If you don’t then AMD, it’s better bang for the buck for rasterization and works better on Linux.

If you’re on Linux AMD is clearly superior because NVidia has Linux performance issue compared to Windows so you’re ending up paying more for less. However NVidia has the monopole for a reason their product are superior but at what price ? Also if you want to avoid proprietary drivers AMD gets the win too.

I do think AMD is the better option for anyone that spend less than 800-1’000$ on a GPU even for Windows gamers. Personnaly I have made the switch from NVidia to AMD 2 years after ditching Windows for Linux, Never looked back even though Cyberpunk2077 looks amazing on NVidia RTX and some other things.

I have upgraded last year to a RX 7800 XT and have no regrets on spending that money.

I have no beef in this argument, and I’m certainly not biased in relation to AMD/Nvidia. However, my 980Ti, my 2070S and now my 4070S have all run really well under Linux. I run KDE Neon and a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570’ installs the latest beta’s in under 5 mins, if I want to roll back the driver a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-565’ has me back on the latest feature branch. Yeah, Wayland adoption under Nvidia was slow, and Nvidia’s earlier choices weren’t what anyone could call ‘ideal’ - But momentum is building, and as a result I’ve been using Wayland for about eight months now without issue. Before that, X11 was largely faultless running Nvidia hardware/drivers.

People say Nvidia struggle in relation to VKD3D performance. I’m not too sure what they’re doing, but VKD3D runs fine here.

It’s the one advantage we have over Mac users: We can run AMD, Intel and Nvidia. We also have ongoing OGL support, native Vulkan support, better game support under Steam, a larger user base under Steam, and the amazing Proton implementation.

Whether it be AMD or Nvidia, I personally think it’s Linux for the win. EDIT: I in no way see value for money in the new 5080/5090 cards and I eagerly await what AMD has to offer (although I won’t be switching from my 4070S for quite some time yet).

From what i’ve heard if your not willing to use the nvidia proprietary drivers then DON’T go for nvidia you will get terrible performance and amd will always be significantly better.

If you consider the proprietary drivers then I think it depends on your use case. For example AMD is better value if your gaming without ray tracing if you want to play with ray tracing or do any kind of productivity Nvidia is generaly the better option. For machine learning Nvidia has much better compatibility with everything so you will have a better time and better performance, Although if you only care about running the largest models you can with the available vram then AMD gpu’s will have more vram for the price.

Intel arc is also always an option if you are aiming for a lower tire/mid range card. They have really price competitive cards and unlike amd they have very decent ray tracing and productivity capability’s. They also have lots more vram for the price compared to Nvidia.

Also I highly recommend buying a used graphics card, you help the environment, save a lot of money and if you don’t like the card you chose you can sell it for the same price your bought it and buy a different one.

Maybe if you could specify your use case and what cards you are currently looking at I could help you out more.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

In that case AMD, no doubt about it.

If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.

Everyone’s gonna suggest AMD here because of your requirement of no-proprietary drivers; but unless you’re some sort of high-value target to a foreign government, I honestly choose the more pragmatic route of just using the proprietary NVidia driver and going NVidia. Especially if I’m not budget constrained on card.

The fact of the matter is, AMD has just simply fallen behind. NVidia cards are (and have been for like 3 generations now) more performant. There is good reason why they dominate the market right now; they’re just simply better.

It really depends on how far you want to take your zealotry on open source; there are parts of the CPU microcode that can see everything you do. Those are proprietary. Your bios is proprietary. You’re probably running 100 different proprietary blobs even IF you choose not to use the drivers that NVidia supplies; so why hobble yourself with a slower card that doesn’t have CUDA instructions? (often also very good for AI work if you are interested in that at all)

I certainly understand wanting to push that direction for the sake of pushing that direction but - is performance and stability less important than using a proprietary driver?

I have an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.