My favorite part about being a reformed gaming addict is the fact that my MacBook now covers ~100% of my computer use cases. The desktop is nice for Visual Studio but that's about it.
I'm still running a 5700XT in my desktop. I have absolutely zero desire to upgrade.
Same boat. I have 5700XT as well and since 2023, used mostly my Mac for gaming.
Just got PRO 6000 96GB for models tuning/training/etc. The cheapest 'good enough' for my needs option.
No mesh shader supports though. I bet more games will start using that soon
My experience with running non-game windows-only programs has been similar over the past ~5 years. It really is finally the Year of the Linux Desktop, only few people seem to have noticed.
I also don't play any games that require a rootkit, so..
When I am in front of windows, I know I can permit myself to relax, breath easy and let off some steam. When I am not, I know I am there to learn/earn a living/produce something etc. Most probably do not need this, but my brain does, or I would never switch off.
I play a lot of HellDivers 2. Despite what a lot of Linux YouTubers say. It doesn't work very well on Linux. The recommendations I got from people was to change distro. I do other stuff on Linux. Game slows down when you need it to be running smoothly doesn't matter what resolution/settings you set.
Anything with anti-cheat probably won't work very well if at all.
I also wanted to play the old Command and Conquer games. Getting the fan made patchers (not the games itself) to run properly that fix a bunch of bugs that EA/Westwood never fixed and mod support is more difficult than I cared to bother with.
Make sure to change your Steam launch options to:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=84 gamemoderun %command%
This will use gamemode to run it, give it priority, put the system in performance power mode, and will fix any pulse audio static you may be having. You can do this for any game you launch with steam, any shortcut, etc.
It's missing probably 15fps on this card between windows and Linux, and since it's above 100fps I really don't even notice.
It does seem to run a bit better under gnome with Variable Refresh Rate than KDE.
I did get it running nice for about a day and then an update was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game runs smoothly when initially running the map and then massive dip in frames for several seconds. This is usually when one of the bugs is jumping at you.
This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or <some other distro> but I find Debian to be super reliable and don't want to switch distro. I also don't like Fedora generally as I've found it unreliable in the past. I had a look at Bazzite and I honestly just wasn't interested. This is due to it having a bunch of technologies that I have no interest in using.
There are other issues that are tangential but related issues.
e.g.
I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound for no particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic (good headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not found. This requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber and Discord (in that order). This happens often enough I have a shell script alias called "fix_discord".
I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to a regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked fine).
I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of a minute.
It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use Linux for work stuff.
Honestly? Fedora is really the premier Linux distro these days. It's where the most the development is happening, by far.
All of my hardware, some old, some brand new (AMD card), worked flawlessly out of the box.
There was a point when you couldn't get me to use an rpm-based distro if my life depended on it. That time is long gone.
It the same reason I don't want to use Bazzite. It misses the point of using a Linux/Unix system altogether.
I also learned a long time ago Distro Hopping doesn't actually fix your issues. You just end up either with the same issues or different ones. If I switched from Debian to Fedora, I suspect I would have many of the same issues.
e.g. If a issue is in the Linux kernel itself such as HDMI Audio on AMD cards having random noise, I fail to see how changing from one distro to another would help. Fedora might have a custom patch to fix this, however I could also take this patch and make my own kernel image (which I've done in the past btw).
The reality is that most people doing development for various project / packages that make the Linux desktop don't have the setup I have and some of the peculiarities I am running into. If I had a more standard setup, I wouldn't have an issue.
Moreover, I would be using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or some other more traditional Unix system and ditch Linux if I didn't require some Linux specific applications. I am considering moving to something like Artix / Devuan in the future if I did decide to switch.
I just switched over to it last night and my audio in Helldivers 2 in particular is awful and I'm having framerate dives.
If I got back to Gnome3, it's much more stable in both fps and audio.
Last one I ever tried was https://www.protondb.com/app/813780 with comments like "works perfectly, except multiplayer is completely broken" and the workaround has changed 3 times so far, also it lags no matter what. Gave up after stealing 4 different DLLs from Windows. It doesn't even have anticheat, it's just cause of some obscure math library.
I literally never had to do that. Most tweaking I needed to do was switching proton versions here and there (which is trivial to do).
Age of empires 2 used to work well, without needing any babying, so I'm not sure why it didn't for you. I will see about spinning it up.
You're supposed to find a proton fork like "glorious eggroll" that has patches specifically for your game.
The vast majority of my gaming library runs fine on Linux. Older games might run better than on Windows, in fact.
And yes, I rarely play anything online multiplayer.
areweanticheatyet.com
My main hobby is videogames, but since I can consistently play most games on Linux (that has good AMD support), it doesn't really matter.
After 3 years, I haven't missed Windows a single day.
Efficiency: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-5050-gaming-o...
Vsync power draw: https://tpucdn.com/review/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-5050-gaming-o...
The variance within Nvidia's line-up is much larger than the variance between brands, anyway.
AMD even admits that they don't want to compete in the high range. I have no loyalty to any company but there is just nothing out there that beats a 5080.
I guess there games that you can only play on PC with Nvidia graphics. That begs the question why someone create a game and ignore large console market.
With their current generation of cards AMD has caught up on all of those things except CUDA, and Intel is in a similar spot now that they've had time to improve their drivers, so it's pretty easy now to buy a non-Nvidia card without feeling like you're giving anything up.
I suspect the thing you're referring to is ZLUDA[0], it allows you to run CUDA code on a range of non NVidia hardware (for some value of "run").
AMD doesn't care about consumers anymore either. All the money in AI.
I mean, this also describes the quality of NVIDIA cards. And their drivers have been broken for the last two decades if you're not using windows.
Traditionally the NVIDIA drivers have been more stable on Windows than the AMD drivers. I choose an AMD card because I wanted a hassle free experience on Linux (well as much as you can).
its been great. flawless in fact.
Maybe there's a difference for the people who buy the absolute top end cards but I don't. I look for best value and when I looked into it amd looked better to me. Also got an amd CPU which has aso been great.
Software. AMD has traditionally been really bad at their drivers. (They also missed the AI train and are trying to catch up).
I use Linux and have learned not to touch AMD GPUs (and to a lesser extent CPUs due to chipset quality/support) a long time ago. Even if they are better now, (I feel) Intel integrated (if no special GPU perf needed) or NVidia are less risky choices.
* Purchase always AMD.
* Purchase never Nvidia.
* Intel is also okay.
While Nvidia comes up with proprietary stuff AMD brought us Vulkan, FreeSync, supported Wayland well already with Implicit-Sync (like Intel) and used the regular Video-Acceleration APIs for long time.
Meanwhile Nvidia:
https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/NV/NV_robustn...
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Okay. But that is probably only a short term solution? It is Nvidias short term solution since 2016!
NVIDIA's drivers also recently completely changed how they worked. Hopefully that'll result in a lot of these long term issues getting fixed. As I understand it, the change is this: The nvidia drivers contain a huge amount of proprietary, closed source code. This code used to be shipped as a closed source binary blob which needed to run on your CPU. And that caused all sorts of problems - because its linux and you can't recompile their binary blob. Earlier this year, they moved all the secret, proprietary parts into a firmware image instead which runs on a coprocessor within the GPU itself. This then allowed them to - at last - opensource (most? all?) of their remaining linux driver code. And that means we can patch and change and recompile that part of the driver. And that should mean the wayland & kernel teams can start fixing these issues.
In theory, users shouldn't notice any changes at all. But I suspect all the nvidia driver problems people have been running into lately have been fallout from this change.
Yes, there are translation layers[1] which you have to know about and understand how to install correctly, which partially solve the problem by translating from VAAPI to NVDEC, but this is certainly not for the average user.
Hopefully, in the future browsers will add support for the new Vulkan Video standard, but for now, unfortunately, one has to hardcode the browser launch parameters in order to use the integrated graphics chip's driver (custom XDG-application file for AMD APU in my case: ~/.local/share/applications/Firefox-amdgpu.desktop): `Exec=env LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=radeonsi DRI_PRIME=0 MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=0 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=radeons i /usr/bin/firefox-beta %u`.
On my Steam deck, I have to use vulkan. AV1 decoder is straight up buggy, have to disable it with config or extensions.
Sadly, a couple of years ago someone seriously misunderstood the news about "open sourcing" their drivers and spread that misunderstanding widely; many people now think their whole driver stack is open, when in reality it's like 1% of the code — the barest minimum they could get away with (I'm excluding GSP code here).
The real FOSS driver is Nova, and it's driven by the community with zero help from Nvidia, as always.
I have no NVIDIA hardware, but I understand that the drivers are even worse than AMD's.
Intel seems to be, at the moment, the least worse compromise between performance and stability,
In my experience an AMD card on linux is a great experience unless you want to do something AI related, in which case there will be random kernel panics (which, in all fairness, may one day go away - then I'll be back on AMD cards because their software support on Linux was otherwise much better than Nvidia's). There might be some kernel upgrades that should be skipped, but using an older kernel is no problem.
They do care about but reports, and their drivers — when given time to stabilize — provide the best experience across all operating systems (easy updates, etc), but IME mainline kernels should be treated as alpha-to-beta material.
Err, what? While you're right about Intel integrated GPUs being a safe choice, AMD has long since been the GPU of choice for Linux -- it just works. Whereas Nvidia on Linux has been flaky for as long as I can remember.
That said, I've been avoiding AMD in general for so long the ecosystem might have really improved in the meantime, as there was no incentive for me to try and switch.
Recently I've been dabbling in AI where AMD GPUs (well, sw ecosystem, really) are lagging behind. Just wasn't worth the hassle.
NVidia hw, once I set it up (which may be a bit involved), has been pretty stable for me.
I have no opinion on GPUs (I don't play anything released later than about 2008), but Intel CPUs have had more problems over the last five years than AMD, including disabling the already limited support for AVX-512 after release and simply burning themselves to the ground to get an easy win in initial benchmarks.
I fear your perception of their products is seriously out of date.
How's the chipset+linux story these days? That was the main reason for not choosing AMD CPU for me the last few times I was in the market.
Now wayland support is an important factor and AMD is a perfectly acceptable and indeed economical choice.
Basically 15 years inertia is hard to counter.
Not OP, I had same experience in the past with AMD,I bought a new laptop and in 6 months the AMD decided that my card is obsolete and no longer provided drivers forcing me to be stuck with older kernel/X11 , so I switched to NVIDIA and after 2 PC changes I still use NVIDIA since the official drivers work great, I really hope AMD this time is putting the effort to keep older generations of cards working on latest kernels/X11 maybe next card will be AMD.
But this is an explanations why us some older Linux users have bad memories with AMD and we had good reason to switch over to NVIDIA and no good reason to switch back to AMD
The situation completely changed with the introduction of the AMDGPU drivers integrated into the kernel. This was like 10 years ago.
Before then the AMD driver situation on Linux was atrocious. The open source drivers performed so bad you'd get better performance out of Intel integrated graphics than an expensive AMD GPU, and their closed source drivers were so poorly updated you'd have to downgrade the entire world for the rest of your software to be compatible. At that time Nvidia was clearly ahead, even though the driver needs to be updated separately and they invented their own versions of some stuff.
With the introduction of AMDGPU and the years after that everything changed. AMD GPUs now worked great without any effort, while Nvidia's tendency to invent their own things really started grating. Much of the world started moving to Wayland, but Nvidia refused to support some important common standards. Those that really wanted their stuff to work on Nvidia had to introduce entirely separate code paths for it, while other parts of the landscape refused to do so. This started improving again a few years ago, but I'm not aware of the current state because I now only use Intel and AMD hardware.
Then there is the (in)famous AMD reset bug that makes AMD a real headache to use with GPU passthrough. The card can't be properly reset when the VM shuts down so you have to reboot the PC to start the VM a second time. There are workarounds but they only work on some cards & scenarios [1] [2]. This problem goes back to around the 390 series cards so they've had forever to properly implement reset according to the pci spec but haven't. nvidia handles this flawlessly
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3911
Lesser OpenGL version, and I never managed to have hardware accelerated video until it died last year.
It's not that I can't live like this, I still have the same card, but if I were looking to do anything AI locally with a new card, for sure it wouldn't be an AMD one.
Wrt/ a1, it worked at one point (a year ago) after 2-3 hours of tinkering, then regressed to not working at all, not even from fresh installs on new, different Linuxes. I tried the main branch and the AMD specific fork as well.
Wrt/ Open WebUI, it works, but the thing uses my CPU.
And... they don't need to. Most of the most played video games on PC are all years old [0]. They're online multiplayer games that are optimized for average spec computers (and mobile) to capture as big a chunk of the potential market as possible.
It's flexing for clout, nothing else to it. And yet, I can't say it's anything new, people have been bragging, boasting and comparing their graphics cards for decades.
[0] https://activeplayer.io/top-15-most-popular-pc-games-of-2022...
The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any) feel like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar to the tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when some studios were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional modes, almost like PC was their prototyping platform for when they made completed the jump with PS4/Xbox one and more mature PC implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more years and titles built targeting the next generation consoles before it's all settled.
I understand the reason for moving to real time ray-tracing. It is much easier for development, and apparently the data for baked/pre-rendered lighting in these big open worlds was getting out of hand. Especially with multiple time-of-day passes.
But, it is only the "path tracing" that top end Nvidia GPUs can do that matches baked lighting detail.
The standard ray-tracing in the latest Doom for instance has a very limited number of entities that actually emit light in a scene. I guess there is the main global illumination source, but many of the extra lighting details in the scene don't emit light. This is a step backward compared to baked lighting.
Even shots from the plasma weapon don't cast any light into the scene with the standard ray-tracing, which Quake 3 was doing.
You don't get headlines and hype by being an affordable way to play games at a decent frame rate, you achieve it by setting New Fps Records.
I think more and more people will realize games are a waste of time for them and go on to find other hobbies. As a game developer, it kinda worries me. As a gamer, I can't wait for gaming to be a niche thing again, haha.
And then there's the age group younger than me, for whom games are not only a hobby but also a "social place to be", I doubt they'll be dropping gaming entirely easily.
You could still sink a ton of time into it if you wanted do, but you could also crank out a decent amount of fun in 5-15 minutes.
Recently games seem to have been optimized to maximize play time rather than for fun density.
These days, AAA games are optimized for "reduced friction", which in practice usually means dumbing down the mechanics and the overall gameplay to remove everything that might annoy or frustrate the player. I was playing Avowed recently and the sheer amount of convenience features (e.g. the entire rest / fast travel system) was boggling.
There was so so so much trial and error in games in the 90s, with some you basically had to press different inputs to even figure out what does what. No QoL features, really poor save systems that forced you to play the same section over and over, terrible voice acting, crappy B-movie plotlines (this hasn't changed that much tbf but there are some amazingly written games too at least to somewhat counterbalance that) etc.
> more and more people will realize games are a waste of time for them and go on to find other hobbies
This is what I'm arguing against, more and more people will realize exactly what sort of games they like and home in on that is a much more likely scenario.
And just in case your point is that games used to be more engaging and fresh, well, Indie games exist. So many games are doing many new things, or fusing existing genres into something fresh. There's a lot more variety to be had in games than most other media.
Nah. Games will always be around.
They will complain endlessly about the price of a RTX 5090 and still rush out to buy it. I know people that own these high end cards as a flex, but their lives are too busy to actually play games.
Now it is hard to draw a straight comparison. Gamers may spend a lot more time playing so $/h isn't a perfect metric. And some will frequently buy new games or worse things like microtransactions which quickly skyrocket the cost. But overall it doesn't seem like the most expensive hobby, especially if you are trying to spend less.
I'd really love to try AMD as a daily driver. For me CUDA is the showstopper. There's really nothing comparable in the AMD camp.
Is there "forwards compatibility" to the same code working on the next cards yet like PTX provided Nvidia?
Last time (4 years ago?) I looked into ROCM, you seemed to have to compile for each revision of each architecture.
The reason I'm not completely sure is because I'm just doing this as a hobby, and I only have a single card, and that single card has never seen a revision. I think that's generally the best way to be happy with ROCM. Accept that it's at the abstraction level of embedded programming, any change in the hardware will have to result in a change in the software.
...and even if you're all in on video games, there's a massive amount of really brilliant indie games on Steam that run just fine on a 1070 or 2070 (I still have my 2070 and haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade yet).
I'm with you - in principle. Capital-G "Gamers" who turned gaming into an identity and see themselves as the real discriminated group have fully earned the ridicule.
But I think where the criticism is valid is how NVIDIA's behavior is part of the wider enshittification trend in tech. Lock-in and overpricing in entertainment software might be annoying but acceptable, but it gets problematic when we have the exact same trends in actually critical tech like phones and cars.
1. Nvidia cards
2. Hooked up to Linux boxes
It turns out that Nvidia tends to work pretty well on Linux too, despite the binary blob drivers.
Other than gaming and ML, I'm not sure what the value of spending much on a GPU is... AMD is just in a tough spot.
You don’t even have to walk away. You pretty much never need the latest GPUs to have a great gaming experience
1. The number of sets per year increased too much, there are too many cards being printed to keep up
2. Cards from new sets are pushed to be very strong (FIRE design) which means that the new cards are frequently the best cards. Combine this with the high number of new sets means the pool of best cards is always churning and you have to constantly be buying new cards to keep up.
3. Artificial scarcity in print runs means that the best cards in the new sets are very expensive. We are talking about cardboard here, it isn’t hard to simply print more sheets of a set.
4. The erosion of the brand identity and universe. MTG used to have a really nicely curated fantasy universe and things meshed together well. Now we have spongebob, deadpool, and a bunch of others in the game. It like if you put spongebob in the star wars universe, it just ruins the texture of the game.
5. Print quality of cards went way down. Older cards actually have better card stock than the new stuff.
6. Canadians MTG players get shafted. When a new set is printed stores get allocations of boxes (due to the artificial scarcity) and due to the lower player count in Canada, usually Canadian stores get much lower allocations than their USA counterparts. Additionally, MTG cards get double tariffs as they get printed outside of the USA, imported into the USA and tariffed, and then imported into Canada and tariffed again. I think the cost of MTG cards when up like 30-40% since global trade war.
Overall it boils down to hasbro turning the screws on players to squeeze more money, and I am just not having it. I already spent obscene amounts of money on the game before this all happened.
My local shop has an entire wall of the last ~70 sets, everything from cyberpunk ninjas to gentlemen academic fighting professors to steampunk and everything in between. I think they are releasing ~10 sets per year on average? 4 main ones and then a bunch of effectively novelty ones. I hadn't been in a store in years (most of my stuff is 4th edition from the late 1990s) I did pull the trigger on the Final Fantasy novelty set recently though, for nostalgia's sake.
But yeah it's overwhelming, as a kid I was used to a new major set every year and a half or so with a handful of new cards. 10 sets a year makes it feel futile to participate.
Long answer: the introduction of non-magic sets like SpongeBob SquarePants, Deadpool, or Assassin's Creed are seen as tasteless money grabs that dilute the quality and theme of magic even further, but fans of those things will scoop them up.
The competitive scene has been pretty rough, but I haven't played constructed formats in a while so I'm not as keyed into this. I just know that there have been lots of cards released recently that have had to be banned for how powerful they were.
Personally, I love the game, but I hate the business model. It's ripe for abuse and people treat cards like stocks to invest in.
So far there hasn't been enough of a performance increase for me to upgrade either for gaming or ML. Maybe AMDs rumored 9090 will be enough to get me to open my wallet.
Running most inference models (quantized of course) via Vulkan. Playing games using Wine and/or Steam+Proton on Linux.
Sweet spot in price.
Systematic fixes are required because as we know advocating for abstinence isn’t an effective solution ;)
I have been rocking AMD GPU ever since the drivers were upstreamed into the linux kernel. No regrets.
I have also realized that there is a lot out there in the world besides video games, and getting all in a huff about it isn’t worth my time or energy. But consumer gotta consoooooom and then cry and outrage when they are exploited instead of just walking away and doing something else.
Same with magic the gathering, the game went to shit and so many people got outraged and in a big huff but they still spend thousands on the hobby. I just stopped playing mtg.