Hi all,
I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.
I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?
The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.
Edit 19/11: Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Since the reactions were quite mixed - “it works perfectly for me” vs “it’s a unmaintainable mess that breaks all the time”, I’m going to err on the side of caution and look elsewhere. I found a used laptop with an AMD Radeon RX 6700M, which I’m going to check out the coming days. If not, I’ve also found Alienware sells their m16 laptop with an RX 7600M XT, which might be a good buy for me (I currently still rock an Alienware 17R1 from 2013 with an MXM card from a decomissioned industrial computer in it).
Nouveau is stable and runs, but don’t expect the best performance. The official NVIDIA driver is unstable, lacks proper wayland support but has decent performance. I’d go with anything but a NVIDIA GPU.
I don’t think so. I can’t find any good information about those new ‘open-source’ kernel modules in any of the Linux wikis. Just news articles from 2022. Something isn’t right there. It’s either a marketing stunt and nothing changed or something else. I would dig deeper if I were you.
Concerning NVidia’s history: Don’t rely on them making user-friendly decisions. Especially when it comes to Linux. The usual drivers work. They have some hiccups and you’re going to have some annoying issues with things like Wayland, if something major changes in the kernel you have to wait for NVidia but they’ll eventually fix it. It’s not open source and you have to live with what they give to you. It mostly works though and performance is great. I’d say this is the same with the newer ‘open-source’ drivers that just shift things into (proprietary) userspace and firmware.
The true open-source alternative is the ‘Nouveau’ drivers. For newer graphics cards, expect them to get only a fraction of the performance out of your GPU and having half the features not yet implemented, including power management. So your game will have 10fps and fans on max while it empties your battery in 20 minutes.
On my laptop Nouveau started to be an alternative after several years when development kept up and it got comparable performance and battery life to the proprietary drivers. But you might replace the laptop at that point. Waiting for NVidia or the open source drivers to keep up hasn’t been worth it for me in the past. I did that two times and everytime I had to live with the proprietary drivers instead.
So my advice is: Be comfortable using the proprietary drivers if you want to buy NVidia.
Intel Arc got really bad performance reviews. It’s not worth spending lots of money on them. But fortunately they’re cheap because the gamers don’t buy them (for that reason). I live with the iGPU that’s part of my CPU. It’s alright since I don’t play modern games anyways.
But you missed AMD. There are some laptops available with the Ryzen 7040 series and it seems to be a fast CPU. They also made the integrated graphics way faster than before, albeit probably still not on the level for proper gaming. But I bet there are desktop replacements out there that combine it with an AMD GPU.
Thanks, that’s what I was thinking as well.
I didn’t miss AMD. The dedicated GPUs just aren’t available new in my wide area, unless they’re put into mediocre plastic shells of a budget laptop, and the integrated GPUs don’t work for my use case.
I just sold an AMD laptop (with RX 6800s) because I wanted a bigger screen. I don’t need top-tier performance, most of the games I play are fine on mainstream gaming hardware. The software experience was perfect but I didn’t use the laptop very often because it was 14" and uncomfortable to use in the couch because of the screen hinge design.
I already have a perfectly fine 2021ThinkPad X1 Nano that does everything I want from a portable computer and I noticed I just never had a reason to use the gaming laptop unless I was gaming. I just want something with a bigger screen and better GPU that will only be moved on our living room table and the storage rack, and the occasional car trip. If the 18" Alienware with RX 7900M was for sale here (for a reasonable price) I would buy that, but that is not going to happen.
As someone who just had to shell out the money to do a lateral move from an Nvidia 2080 to a RX 6700XT - don’t go with Nvidia if you’re wanting to have a good time.
That’s what I got from my past experiences as well, but I haven’t owned anything Nvidia since the Pascal (GTX 10x0) era so I wanted to check if anything got better with their open source efforts.
As someone with an Nvidia GPU (3060 mobile) with no issues, this is mostly FUD from AMD fanboys.
Experience > theory, everytime. Especially the theory of strangers on internet forums. :)
Yeah, I wish it had just been theory, I wouldn’t blatantly say something like my original comment if it weren’t based off experience. I’ve written numerous comments on my experience with Nvidia + Linux [+ Wayland] - such as this comment, primarily the the second, third, and fourth paragraphs. Sadly I don’t think its possible to “relative” link direct comments, so I’ve just linked my instance instead.
Since you mentioned it’s a mobile GPU, I’m not sure if perhaps you have also have an internal GPU that is drawing your regular desktop. My friend doesn’t have nearly the same amount of issues that I have with Wayland, because he’s able to drive his desktop with his iGPU and does GPU passthrough to play games through a Windows VM - the 5600X that I have doesn’t include integrated graphics so this was not possible for me.
Either way, if it works for you then fantastic. It certainly didn’t work for me, and definitely not for a lack of trying.
DONT get an nvidia GPU.
It works but its a nightmare sometimes. The drivers are still bad. Dont’t.
-nvidia user
it’s not there yet but in a few years from now there is hope, a vulkan driver is in the work and the nvidia signed firmware would allow power management for newer gpu, but it’s not ready yet…
