AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2).

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...

Nvidia makes a fine GPU. The problem with Nvidia on linux is the drivers. You're beholden to Team Green for driver updates, and when they decide not to support a GPU anymore, that's it. Now, linux does have the nouveau driver, but that doesn't support all the hardware or much 3d at all, and never will.

I particularly got fed up with Nvidia on linux playing War Thunder - I had a regular crash that Gaijin and Nvidia each blamed on each other, and I never did get it fixed.

Nvidia driver updates can also leave you stuck with no desktop environment on occasion and while fixable, it's a pain in the rear. However, when the drivers are right, Nvidia performance is second to none.

AMD has drivers built right into the kernel, and as long as you have whichever nonfree firmware repos your distro supports (I use Devuan, a Debian derivative), AMD cards 'just work'. If using xorg, install xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu for modern cards, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon for older cards. I'm currently playing on a Radeon 9070 (non-XT) on a 1440p monitor with plenty of performance. I know that it also works on wayland, but I have no experience there.

AMD does a lot of work to ensure their support for Linux is first-class. With the kernel now natively supporting their systems, you can expect good support. It's earned them some good will over Nvidia which has gotten better recently with the rise of AI, but still requires users to jump through a couple of hoops due to their attempts to protect their IP.

I built a Linux gaming PC a few years ago, running Bazzite.

AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.

I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.

I technically have both in one laptop with an AMD iGPU and an RTX GPU. Most of my problems with archlinux is running a 240Hz HDR monitor on dGPU, where the NVIDIA firmware glitches into buffer out of memory errors not reading the CDID properly, and this was solved only less than a month ago with latest beta driver. Lingering problem is waking from memory with crashed plasmashell but this one is KDE Plasma specific, while the monitor one is Linux wide.

I run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck.

Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.

Right now AMD is the better choice due to support from Valve. It might change in the future due to Red Hat's effort.

I bought AMD as my last GPU purely because it meant I didn't have to stress out about how I was actually going to acquire one. I just walked into Microcenter, picked one off the shelf, and checked out. It was the crypto craze then, and I get the impression that this hasn't changed much today with AI sucking all the oxygen out of consumer electronics. Didn't care very much about DLSS or any other Nvidia specific features. That AMD works well on Linux only sweetened the deal.

I think this gets overblown a bit. AMD is better, but Nvidia can work. There's plenty of valid reasons to put in the extra effort and go with Nvidia.

Either. If you want Nvidia features like DLSS then go with NVidia.

People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.

Just anecdata, but I just got a Lenovo T16 with AMD. Graphics is just painless, everything works with no issues. My old system with an Nvidia card running the same O/S keeps running into weird issues. It mostly works, just needs attention and little tweaks and extra stuff sometimes.

For gaming and desktop use AMD is great, though for raytracing you'll need newer cards. If you want to run local AI models too then AMD is quite shaky, rocm only supports a few cards with each version and their software stack just isn't as polished as nvidia's.

Def AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.

AMD for sure. Years ago for Linux NVIDIA was the sure winner. At the moment, AMD beats it out soundly on both cost and performance. ie, the same game running on either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in Linux will generally run much better on the AMD GPU.

AMD has provided great support for far longer, but newer Nvidia cards which support the nvidia-open driver should also be good.

Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.

yes absolutely -- although I did use Nvidia GTX 1070 for a bunch of years without much of an issue, and I still believe Nvidia gets you more "bang for your buck", I would only buy AMD cards now due to the more integral support with Linux gaming.

End of 2024 I did exactly that. Ryzen and RADEON all the way. Rocking Fedora right now but was using Ubuntu for a bit. I have no reason to use Windows at all.

AFAIK none of AMD's offerings match the 5090 for pure gaming performance, so personally that's what I would stick with regardless.

AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers

yes

both are shit

I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit.

Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox