Hey everyone,
I’m currently rocking a 3080 I bought second hand in my Arch Linux rig. It works great under xorg but not so much wayland. There are a number of bugs and gaming performance is worse. I would like to use wayland in general for the mixed refresh rates with dual monitors. My question is: Is AMD really that much better than Nvidia? Is the AMD experience issue free with wayland? Also, how is hardware encoding with AMD? I’m particularly curious how performance is for game streaming with sunshine. I currently use nvenc hardware encoding which is amazing and feels like there is no latency. Does AMD have a similar experience?
Thanks!
After using arch with my 1070 Ti for 3 weeks, Nvidia driver updates have caused major issues twice already and from what I read around the Internet, I think it’s pretty safe to say that all nvidia cards become progressively worse experiences over time. Haven’t tried arch on AMD yet, but I will soon. Nvidia and especially their driver devs can suck a dick.
I’m curious, what exactly did break?
First time I installed CUDA, it worked for a bit and then I rebooted and got stuck on “loading initial ramdisk”. I had to chroot in from the installer and remove both cuda and the nvidia driver.
The next time I ran a normal system upgrade and steam didn’t launch anymore, so I had to manually downgrade the nvidia packages.
Can’t say I’ve used CUDA much, but in my experience (which includes over a couple dozens of computers running Nvidia drivers on Arch) a system upgrade has never broken a system because of Nvidia drivers in Arch. Make sure you use the dkms package, otherwise you need to remember to rebuild the modules for kernel or driver updates, this is a deliberate decision by Arch system. Although that’s probably not what happened to you, otherwise it would have reverted to open source drivers, and steam works perfectly fine with those. In fact unless you’re using Wayland I can’t think of a reason why steam wouldn’t launch that’s related to GPU drivers.