Hi everyone,
I’m looking to buy a new gaming rig as my current machine feels like it’s getting a bit dated. Been gaming on Linux for the past 6 months to a year. Ditched Windows around the time they announced ads and that recall bullshit.
What are your experiences with gfx cards and their drivers? I haven’t bought AMD (gfx) in… Over 20 years. Online results show conflicting answers. Some swear by AMD, others say the drivers are unstable and they need to reboot when switching games. Other say never to update the drivers as long as stuff works.
Currently have an Nvidia 2080 super. Which has served me quite well. But newer games are starting to give it a hard time. Never really had any driver related issue.
I have a friend with an AMD gfx ( windows) and he’s not super happy with it. Game/pc crashes related to it apparently. So I’m a bit on the fence about AMD.
I’m not sure what to look for in a cpu. I currently have an AMD. I guess more expensive is better and that’s about it? Is there a noticeable benefit of the amd 9 vs AMD 7 series?
I’m not looking to overclock any of the hardware.
What’s the standard regarding memory nowadays? I’ve got 16 in my current rig, and more can’t hurt. I would never go under 16. Was looking at 32 but I’ve seen PCs with 64 and wondered if that is just overkill or not.
I’ve mainly games on nobara, but recently switched to bazzite as I’ve been meaning to give that a go. I didn’t really have any complaints om nobara.
Side note: my monitor supports Nvidia whatsitcalled, but not free sync I think.
CPU
Some games benefit a lot from the large L3 cache in the X3D cpus, f.e. the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Check whether it is true for the ones you play.
GPU
I’m running an AMD 6650XT GPU in Linux without any trouble, I even use vfio to use it in a Fedora VM without errors.
RAM
Buying 2x32GB gives you enough RAM to run a bunch of VMs while gaming. 2x16GB is more than enough for a gaming rig.
I had similar worries about the AMD driver stability before I switched from NV about 5 years ago. But my experience has been great even back then and things have only improved since.
One data point to consider is that Valve is shipping the Steam Deck with an AMD AMU and stability and compatibility is paramount for that use case.
AMD Ryzen 7000 vs 9000 isn’t a huge difference iirc, mostly more efficient. The X3D variants are definitely worth it for gaming performance though, so I’d wait for the 9000 X3D reviews to compare.
32GBs is plenty of RAM for now, 64GB is overkill for gaming purposes. I don’t use 100% of my RAM ever and that’s with Discord and a bunch of browser tabs open while playing Cyberpunk or heavily modded Minecraft.
For the GPU, I currently use a 7900 XTX and haven’t had issues running that with Manjaro Linux. Haven’t used an Nvidia GPU with Linux, but from what I can tell their support was/is dubious but improving.
Since AMD has open source drivers, their cards tend to have better support for most things (like Wayland).
But in general, I think you can pick either and be fine. I have an old laptop with a GTX 960M, and it works great with Bazzite and the latest Nvidia drivers. My main desktop (RTX 3060ti) I haven’t yet switched, but the only distro that didn’t work on live media was MX Linux (it had problems with multiple monitors).
Your friend is right – AMD graphics on Windows can be a pain (last I checked)
That said the reverse is true on Linux, AMD GPU is fucking sweetas – I got at least a dozen or 2 dozen AMD GPUs > 2016 and they kick ass, never gonna give them up or let them down :P
There’s a reason AMD is crushing it on Linux
Nvidia GPUs seem pretty solid with the latest driver developments around Wayland explicit sync now. I haven’t had the experience with a modern AMD GPU to compare, so hopefully others can chime in there. I think AMD stability depends on which driver you use.
As for AMD CPUs, I don’t think you can really go wrong if you go with the x6xx class or above. The X3D variants are supposed to have a bit of an edge in games but a very slight penalty in other general computing tasks. Doubtful it would be anything perceptible other than in benchmarks or compile times. If your system is primarily being built for gaming, I’d say opt for an X3D part if all other things are equal. If it’s more of a workstation kind of system, or you plan to leverage a lot of virtualization tech, I’d say spend as much as you’re willing to stuff as many CPU cores into that machine as you can.
As for memory, more is always better. I’ve got 32 GB on my main system and never felt like there was anything it couldn’t handle, and that’s even being somewhat sloppy leaving other fairly memory intensive programs running in the background while I game. In that department, I’d just go with 32 gigs and call it a day, unless you’re doing video capture/editing.
Nvidia Gsync shouldn’t be an issue in Linux, at least not with an Nvidia card. If the monitor doesn’t also support Freesync, then that might cause a hassle with an AMD card.
Good luck and have fun!
Has the Nvidia screen tearing issue been fixed? I’ve had 2 computers with Nvidia GPUs (GTX 560 Ti & GTX 765M) and they both had awful screen tearing that I couldn’t get rid of unless I disabled compositing.
Those are some pretty old cards. I wonder if that’s at least part of the source of your issues.
