It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way t…
I’ve had so many problems with Nvidia GPUs on Linux over the years that I now refuse to buy anything Nvidia. AMD cards work flawlessly and get very long-term support.
Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.
People buy Nvidia for different reasons, but not everyone faces any issues with it in Linux, and so they see no reason to change what they’re already familiar with.
When people switch to Linux they don’t do a lot of research beforehand. I, for one, didn’t know that Nvidia doesn’t work well with it until I had been using it for years.
To be fair, Nvidia supports their newer GPUs well enough, so you may not have any problems for a while. But once they decide to end support for a product line, it’s basically a death sentence for that hardware. That’s what happened to me recently with the 470 driver. Older GPU worked fine until a kernel update broke the driver. There’s nobody fixing it anymore, and they won’t open-source even obsolete drivers.
Similar for me. All the talk about what software Linux couldn’t handle, I didn’t learn that Linux hates Nvidia until AFTER I updated my GPU. I don’t want to buy another GPU after less than a year, but Windows makes me want to do a sodoku in protest, but also my work and design software wont run properly on Linux and all anybody can talk about is browsers and games.
Amd had approximately 1 consumer gpu with rocm support so unless your framework supports opencl or you want to fuck around with unsupported rocm drivers then you’re out of luck. They’ve completely failed to meet the market
I mean… my 6700xt dont have offical rocm support, but the rocm driver works perfectly fine for it. The difference is amd hasnt but the effort in testing rocm on their consumer cards, thus cant make claims support for it.
Yeah, I stopped using Nvidia like 20 years ago. I think my last Nvidia card may have been a GeForce MX, then I switched to a Matrox card for a time before landing on ATI/AMD.
Back then AMD was only just starting their open source driver efforts so the “good” driver was still proprietary, but I stuck with them to support their efforts with my wallet. I’m glad I did because it’s been well over a decade since I had any GPU issues, and I no longer stress about whether the hardware I buy is going to work or not (so long as the Kernel is up to date).
I had an old NVidia gtx 970 on my previous machine when I switched to Linux and it was the source of 95% of my problems.
It died earlier this year so I finally upgraded to a new machine and put an Intel Arc B580 in it as a stop gap in hopes that video cards prices would regain some sanity eventually in a year or two. No problems whatsoever with it since then.
Now that AI is about to ruin the GPU market again I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an AMD RX 9070 XT before the prices go through the roof. I ain’t touching NVidia’s cards with a 10 foot pole. I might be able to sell my B580 for the same price I originally bought it for in a few months.
I’ve had so many problems with Nvidia GPUs on Linux over the years that I now refuse to buy anything Nvidia. AMD cards work flawlessly and get very long-term support.
I just replaced my old 1060 with a Radeon 6600 rx myself.
I’m with you, I know we’ve had a lot of recent Linux converts, but I don’t get why so many who’ve used Linux for years still buy Nvidia.
Like yeah, there’s going to be some cool stuff, but it’s going to be clunky and temporary.
Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.
People buy Nvidia for different reasons, but not everyone faces any issues with it in Linux, and so they see no reason to change what they’re already familiar with.
When people switch to Linux they don’t do a lot of research beforehand. I, for one, didn’t know that Nvidia doesn’t work well with it until I had been using it for years.
To be fair, Nvidia supports their newer GPUs well enough, so you may not have any problems for a while. But once they decide to end support for a product line, it’s basically a death sentence for that hardware. That’s what happened to me recently with the 470 driver. Older GPU worked fine until a kernel update broke the driver. There’s nobody fixing it anymore, and they won’t open-source even obsolete drivers.
It’s a good way for people to learn about fully hostile companies to the linux ecosystem.
Similar for me. All the talk about what software Linux couldn’t handle, I didn’t learn that Linux hates Nvidia until AFTER I updated my GPU. I don’t want to buy another GPU after less than a year, but Windows makes me want to do a sodoku in protest, but also my work and design software wont run properly on Linux and all anybody can talk about is browsers and games.
I’m damned whether I switch or not.
got that backwards
That’s fine and dandy until you need to do ML, there is no other option
I successfully ran local Llama with llama.cpp and an old AMD GPU. I’m not sure why you think there’s no other option.
Amd had approximately 1 consumer gpu with rocm support so unless your framework supports opencl or you want to fuck around with unsupported rocm drivers then you’re out of luck. They’ve completely failed to meet the market
I mean… my 6700xt dont have offical rocm support, but the rocm driver works perfectly fine for it. The difference is amd hasnt but the effort in testing rocm on their consumer cards, thus cant make claims support for it.
Yeah, I stopped using Nvidia like 20 years ago. I think my last Nvidia card may have been a GeForce MX, then I switched to a Matrox card for a time before landing on ATI/AMD.
Back then AMD was only just starting their open source driver efforts so the “good” driver was still proprietary, but I stuck with them to support their efforts with my wallet. I’m glad I did because it’s been well over a decade since I had any GPU issues, and I no longer stress about whether the hardware I buy is going to work or not (so long as the Kernel is up to date).
I had an old NVidia gtx 970 on my previous machine when I switched to Linux and it was the source of 95% of my problems.
It died earlier this year so I finally upgraded to a new machine and put an Intel Arc B580 in it as a stop gap in hopes that video cards prices would regain some sanity eventually in a year or two. No problems whatsoever with it since then.
Now that AI is about to ruin the GPU market again I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an AMD RX 9070 XT before the prices go through the roof. I ain’t touching NVidia’s cards with a 10 foot pole. I might be able to sell my B580 for the same price I originally bought it for in a few months.