Hey all! This is my first post, so I’m sorry if anything is formatted incorrectly or if this is the wrong place to ask this. Recently I’ve saved up enough to upgrade my graphics card ($350 budget). I’ve heard great things about amd on linux and appreciate open source drivers so as to not be at the mercy of nvidia. My first choice of graphics card was a 6700xt, but then I heard that nvidia had significantly higher performance in terms of workstation tasks (not to mention the benefits of cuda and nvenc) and have been looking into a 3060 or 3060 ti. I do a bit of gaming in my free time, but its not my top priority, and I can almost guarantee that any option in this price range will be more than enough for the games I play. Ultimately my questions come down to:
- Would nvida or amd provide more raw performance on linux for my price range?
- Which would be better for productivity cuda encoding etc. (I mainly use blender, freecad, and solidworks, but I appreciate having extra features for any software that I may use in the future).
- What option would work best after a few years? (I’ve seen amd increase rheir performance with driver updates before, but the nvk driver also looks promising. I also host some servers and tend to cycle my componenta from my main system into my proxmox cluster).
Also a bit more details to hopefully help with any missing info: My current system is a Ryzen 7 3700x, gtx 1050 ti, 32gb ram, 850 watt psu, and nvme ssd. I’ve only ever used nvidia cards, but amd looks like a great alternative. As another side note, if there’s any way to run cuda apps on amd I plan on running my new gpu alongside my old one so nvenc is not too much of a concern.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or ideas!
Edit 1: thanks so much for all of the feedback! I’m not going to purchase a gpu quite yet but probably in a few weeks. First I’ll be testing wayland with my 1050 ti and just researching how much I need each feature of each gpu. Thanks again for all of your feedback, I’ll update the post when I do order said gpu.
Edit 2: I made an interesting decision and actually got the arc a770. I’d be happy to discuss exactly why, and some of the pros and cons so far, but I do plan on eventually compiling a more in depth review somewhere sometime.
Keep in mind that nvidia drops proprietary driver support for its older cards from time to time, so your card will eventually be desupported by them. The extent to which this matters for you depends on how long a timespan your “after a few years” represents. If “a few years” is just 2-3 years, you’re probably okay, but if it’s 8-10 years, your card will be desupported before you’re ready to get rid of it.
CUDA is a proprietary nvidia API, so you aren’t likely to get it working on an AMD card.
Yeah, my use case is definately more in the 10+ years range lol I’ve only recently learned about rocm and hip for amd which may show promise as well. Do you think nvk will have matured more by then?
I just read today that the newest version of ROCm (5.7.1) supports the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the first consumer GPU to have official support in a long time. That one is about three times your budget, so there is no way to get an officially supported one. Reportedly some unsupported models work too, but I’d say you’re looking at a lot of hurdles here.