On the other hand, my Steam Deck has been exceedingly stable.

So I guess I would say: Buy AMD but understand that they don't have the resources to truly support all of their hardware on any platform, so they have to prioritize.

Took me almost 5 min to drill through enough Wikipedia pages to find the Radeon VII string.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_RX_Vega_series

Contrast that with the earlier R9 285 that I used for nearly 10 years until I was finally able to get a 9070XT that I'm very happy with. They were still refining support for that aged GCN 1.2 driver even today, even if things are a lower priority to backport.

Overall the ONLY things I'm unhappy about this GPU generation.

* Too damned expensive * Not enough VRAM (and no ECC off of workstation cards?) * Too hard for average consumers to just buy direct and cut out the scalpers

The only way I could get my hands on a card was to buy through a friend that lives within range of a Microcenter. The only true saints of computer hardware in the whole USA.

Linux support has been excellent on AMD for less than 15 years though. It got really good around 10 years ago, not before.

They were one of the first to actually support open source drivers, with the r128 and original radeon (r100) drivers. Then went radio silence for the next few years, though the community used that as a baseline to support the next few generations (r100 to r500).

Then they reemerged with actually providing documentation for their Radeon HD series (r600 and r700), and some development resources but limited - and often at odds with the community-run equivalents at the time (lots of parallel development with things like the "radeonhd" driver and disagreements on how much they should rely on their "atombios" card firmware).

That "moderate" level of involvement continued for years, releasing documentation and some initial code for the GCN cards, but it felt like beyond the initial code drops most of the continuing work was more community-run.

Then only relatively recently (the last ~10 years) have they started putting actual engineering effort into things again, with AMDGPU and the majority of mesa changes now being paid for by AMD (or Valve, which is "AMD by proxy" really as you can guarantee every $ they spend on an engineer is $ less they pay to AMD).

So hopefully that's a trend you can actually rely on now, but I've been watching too long to think that can't change on a dime.

This actually makes sense: for example, a new task has swapped out previous task's data, or host and guest are sharing the GPU and pushing each others data away. I don't understand why this is not a part of GPU-related standards.

As for solution, discarding all the GPU data after resume won't help? Or keeping the data in the system RAM.

However, doing research when buying a new pc, I've found that AMD kind of sucks too. ROCm isn't even supported on many of the systems i was looking into. Also, I've heard their Linux graphics drivers are poor.

So basically I just rock a potato with Intel integrated graphics now. GPUs cost too much to deal with that nonsense.

Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too).

> I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

Maybe you should.

Correction - if they care. And they don't care to do it on Linux, so you get them dragging feet for decades for something like Wayland support, PRIME, you name it.

Basically, the result is that in practice they offer abysmally bad support, otherwise they'd have upstream kernel drivers and no userspace blobs. Linux users should never buy Nvidia.

I don't understand what you're saying here. I've used NVidia on Linux and FreeBSD a lot. They work great.

If your argument is they don't implement some particular feature that matters to you, fair enough. But that's not an argument that they don't offer stability or Linux support. They do.

Long term support means my thing that has been working great continues to work great. New feature implementation has nothing to do with that and is arguably directly against long term support.

And Nvidia seems justified in this since effectively no distro dropper X11 until Nvidia had support.

I use AMD gpus on linux, I generally regret not just buying an Nvidia GPU purely because of AMDs lacklustre support for compute use cases in general.

Intel is still too new in the dGPU market to trust and on top of that there is so much uncertainty about whether that entire product line will disappear.

So at this point the CUDA moat makes is a non issue, on top of that what works works and keeps working, whereas with AMD I constantly wonder whether something will randomly not work after an update.

A timeline of decades for “features” your biggest consumers don’t care about is a reasonable tradeoff, even more so if actually pushing those features would reduce stability.

Both Mutter and KWin have really good Nvidia Wayland sessions nowadays.

I.e. if anything new will need something implemented tomorrow, Nvidia will make their users wait another decade again. Which I consider an unacceptable level of support and something that flies in the face of those who claim that Nvidia supports Linux well.

Those who want to run Linux seriously will buy AMD. Intel will be slowly phased out, and this will reduce maintenance and increase the quality of anything that previously had to support both Intel and AMD.

However, if Microsoft or Apple scoop up AMD, all hell will break loose. I don’t think either would have interest in Linux support.

Less competition is NOT good news for AMD users. Their CPUs are already at lot less competitively priced now that they beat Intel for market share.

/ steps down from soap box /

I have been looking at high-end laptops with dedicated AMD Graphics chip, but can't find many... So I will probably go with AMD+NVidia with MUX switch, let's see how it goes... Unless someone else has other suggestions?

What I mean is that whenever NVIDIA removed features from their "consumer" GPUs in order to reduce production costs and increase profits, AMD immediately followed them, instead of attempting to offer GPUs that have something that NVIDIA does not have.

Intel at least tries to be a real competitor, e.g. by offering much, much better FP64 performance or by offering more memory.

If Intel's discrete GPUs disappear, there will be no competition in consumer GPUs, as AMD tries to compete only in "datacenter" GPUs. I have ancient AMD GPUs that I cannot upgrade to newer AMD GPUs, because the newer GPUs are worse, not better (for computational applications; I do not care about games), while Intel offers acceptable substitutes, due to excellent performance per $.

Moreover, NVIDIA also had excellent Linux driver support for more than 2 decades, not only for games, but also for professional graphics applications (i.e. much better OpenGL support than AMD) and for GPU computing applications (i.e. CUDA). AMD gets bonus points for open-source drivers and much more complete documentation, but the quality of their drivers has been typically significantly worse.

NVIDIA always had good support even for FreeBSD, where I had to buy discrete NVIDIA GPU cards for computers with AMD APUs that were not supported for any other OS except Windows and Linux.

AMD "consumer" GPUs are a great choice for those who are interested only in games, but not for those interested in any other GPU applications. AMD "datacenter" GPUs are good, but they are far too expensive to be worthwhile for small businesses or for individuals.

Funnily, AMD's in-tree drivers are kind of a pain in the ass. For up to a year after a new GPU is released, you have to deal with using mesa and kernel packages from outside your distro.. While if you buy a brand new nVidia card, you just install the latest release of the proprietary drivers and it'll work.

Linux's driver model really is not kind to new hardware releases.

Of course, I still buy AMD because Nvidia's drivers really aren't very good. But that first half a year was not pleasant last time I got a relatively recently released (as in, released half a year earlier) AMD card.

I have since switched from Ubuntu to Fedora, maybe Fedora ships mesa and kernel updates within a week or two from release, I don't know. But being unable to use the preferred distro is a serious downside for many people.