The nouveau drivers are just barely enough to have a desktop, anything actually needing a GPU will perform very poorly (in my anecdotal experience with 4K). Or, to put it another way, choosing an NVIDIA card is choosing their proprietary drivers.

So you’re left with AMD (and Intel). The open amdgpu driver is pretty good and is suitable for gaming. Which I do.

I have no experience with Intel, but I believe their open drivers are pretty good.

So I recommend AMD.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers

So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.

The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

In that case AMD, no doubt about it.

If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.

My two cents.

I have quite a few Nvidia GPUs I still use (2080,3080ti,3090) but recently purchased two AMD cards. I have a 5700xt and 7800xt.

I recently started using Universal Blue Linux as my daily driver on most of my systems. Bluefin for my desktop with Nvidia, Bazzite for my gaming PC with AMD.

They do both work however I have still had more issues with NVIDIA than AMD. For example, running games tends to be buggier but that is specifically an Nvidia driver issue. I’m guessing most hot fixes come out for the windows driver first. For instance, FF7 Rebirth does not render world geometry on Nvidia on Linux. I do not have this problem under AMD

I started purchasing the AMD cards because I was growing tired of waiting for Nvidia stability on Linux.

Is it much better than it was before , yes Do you use Nvidia CUDA apps or AI? Check, that works! Is it still as smooth and seamless as AMD, nope, you’re still going to end up with regressions.

I think it’s only a matter time before Nvidia finally figured this out as they heavily rely on Linux as a platform in their own work. But right now your best user experience overall is going to be on AMD hardware.

I have no beef in this argument, and I’m certainly not biased in relation to AMD/Nvidia. However, my 980Ti, my 2070S and now my 4070S have all run really well under Linux. I run KDE Neon and a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570’ installs the latest beta’s in under 5 mins, if I want to roll back the driver a quick ‘sudo apt install nvidia-driver-565’ has me back on the latest feature branch. Yeah, Wayland adoption under Nvidia was slow, and Nvidia’s earlier choices weren’t what anyone could call ‘ideal’ - But momentum is building, and as a result I’ve been using Wayland for about eight months now without issue. Before that, X11 was largely faultless running Nvidia hardware/drivers.

People say Nvidia struggle in relation to VKD3D performance. I’m not too sure what they’re doing, but VKD3D runs fine here.

It’s the one advantage we have over Mac users: We can run AMD, Intel and Nvidia. We also have ongoing OGL support, native Vulkan support, better game support under Steam, a larger user base under Steam, and the amazing Proton implementation.

Whether it be AMD or Nvidia, I personally think it’s Linux for the win. EDIT: I in no way see value for money in the new 5080/5090 cards and I eagerly await what AMD has to offer (although I won’t be switching from my 4070S for quite some time yet).

If you’re unwilling to use proprietary drivers AMD or Intel if yout friend. If you use proprietary drivers NVIDIA is mostly fine now.

I have an RTX 4070 ti super and it works great. But I use proprietary drivers.

From what i’ve heard if your not willing to use the nvidia proprietary drivers then DON’T go for nvidia you will get terrible performance and amd will always be significantly better.

If you consider the proprietary drivers then I think it depends on your use case. For example AMD is better value if your gaming without ray tracing if you want to play with ray tracing or do any kind of productivity Nvidia is generaly the better option. For machine learning Nvidia has much better compatibility with everything so you will have a better time and better performance, Although if you only care about running the largest models you can with the available vram then AMD gpu’s will have more vram for the price.

Intel arc is also always an option if you are aiming for a lower tire/mid range card. They have really price competitive cards and unlike amd they have very decent ray tracing and productivity capability’s. They also have lots more vram for the price compared to Nvidia.

Also I highly recommend buying a used graphics card, you help the environment, save a lot of money and if you don’t like the card you chose you can sell it for the same price your bought it and buy a different one.

Maybe if you could specify your use case and what cards you are currently looking at I could help you out more.

In my experience older nvidia cards (~5 years old +) work fine, newer ones are very hit-or-miss
Amd cards of any age work pretty much perfectly as far as I can tell

Though if the drivers not being proprietary is a hard line for you then amd is your only option really

If you want Nvidia Reflex,DLSS and RTX and GSYNC,etc and your fine with installing out of tree proprietary drivers and fine with some issues Nvidia If you don’t care about Nvidias features AMD.

AMD is by far the best choice for foss drivers. Intel might be an option in the future but I have no experience with their new cards. A second option would be good for Linux users but it’s unlikely to be NVIDIA.

FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.

Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.

Honestly even on Windows I preferred AMD’s software suite compared to Nvidia control panel and GeForce Experience. Currently using a 7900XTX and pretty happy with it. Also I missed Radeon Chill when I was on Nvidia, didn’t expect to care about that at all, but I love it.

if you are on linux AMD is the better choice, period.

don’t get me wrong nvidia will work relatively well, ive ran it before on linux and its actually improving. but it isnt worth the pricetag to have tons of small issues everywhere.

NVIDIA is more problematic than AMD on Linux. So AMD.