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.
@neogeo I think you may be on the right track with grabbing a newer AMD card, and keeping your old nv one just for the encoding stuff if you absolutely need it. I only do quite a bit of small drawing (mostly technical) in both blender and FreeCAD, as well as some occasional video editing in blender. I've had a RX5600XT since before we had proper drivers for it, and I've had no issues with it ever since they were in testing.
At the moment I'm torn between getting an nvidia card and waiting for nvk to be developed, or getting an amd card and waiting for ROCm to be developed. As a side note, I realized while I will still hold onto my 1050 ti, I may not have enough pcie lanes to run said new gpu at full 16x and instead may put my 1050 ti in one of my proxmox nodes (maybe use it for a blender cluster idk). How have freecad and blender been with the 5600xt? I'm just wondering if amd may be a better long term option because of its raw power and already existing open source drivers.
@neogeo It's been excellent, but again, I'm not doing very heavy work with it. Although, if I do play around with large models, it has no problem redering em. And games such as Star Citizen, Starfield, and Cyberpunk 2077, all run fantastic when turned up to 11.