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.
As much as I want to say AMD because of the open source drivers (I've also never had one, but my next card is definitely going to be an AMD one), you mentioned Blender, and last I check Nvidia's GPUs are much more performant in Blender. Here's a benchmark https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/3d-design-workstations/blender/hardware-recommendations/ in there you can see that a 3060 has slightly worse performance than a 7900xtx and considerable better performance than a 6900xt, you're talking about getting a 6700xt so the difference will be even larger. So if Blender is your primary use case I would go with NVIDIA.
I'm not going to disagree, just add to what you wrote.
While it's true that AMD's HIP is nowhere near as powerful as either CUDA or OptiX, my 6750xt is about as performant as my previous 2060 Super, and definitely not unusable. The single greatest performance hog in Cycles is actually the viewport denoiser because it runs on the CPU (as opposed to Optix, which runs on the GPU), and runs on every frame.
There is an additional issue with Eevee: complex shaders take forever to compile. It's an issue with Mesa and there is already a patch that will likely be included in the next release.
Still, as painful as it is, nvidia has better performance and usability in Blender at present.