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Submitted via IRC for takyon
Continuing on from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 expectations on Linux shared earlier this week, here's a list of ten reasons why Linux gamers might want to pass on these soon-to-launch graphics cards from NVIDIA.
The list are various reasons you may want to think twice on these graphics cards -- at least not for pre-ordering any of them right away. Not all of them are specific to the Turing GPUs per se but also some NVIDIA Linux infrastructure problems or general Linux gaming challenges, but here's the list for those curious. And, yes, a list is coming out soon with reasons Linux users may want to consider the RTX 20 series -- well, mostly for developers / content creators it may make sense.
Here is the list:
- Lack of open-source driver support
- It will be a while before seeing RTX/ray-tracing Linux games
- Turing appears to be a fairly incremental upgrade outside of RTX
- The GeForce GTX 1080 series already runs very well
- Poor Wayland support
- The Linux driver support for Turing is unclear
- These graphics cards are incredibly expensive
- SLI is next to worthless on Linux
- VR Linux support is still in rough shape
- Pascal prices will almost surely drop
That's the quick list outside of my detailed pre-launch Linux analysis. A similar list of the pros for the RTX 20 series on Linux will be coming out shortly. It will certainly be interesting to see after 20 September how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 series works on Linux.
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=10-Reasons-Pass-RTX-20-Linux
Previously: Nvidia Announces RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 GPUs, Claims 25x Increase in Ray-Tracing Performance
(Score: 5, Informative) by boltronics on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:44AM (24 children)
If you're on GNU/Linux, you would have to be mad to purchase Nvidia. That is, unless you just run Ubuntu and don't care about free software support and must have the fastest possible card.
If you're on Nvidia, you're never going to get the best out of the box experience due to the proprietary drivers, which last I checked nobody shipped by default. Nouveau (nvidia free software drivers) has significant issues making it not terribly useful on any modern card.
The main hindrance to using an AMD card is the lack of FreeSync support on GNU/Linux, and that is about to change [phoronix.com]. The drivers for AMD cards are really quite wonderful at this point.
I remember it used to be that if you wanted to game under GNU/Linux in any serious capacity, you basically had to use an Nvidia card with their proprietary drivers. These days, Nvidia will generally give you the most frustrating experience. How the tables have turned.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:52AM (6 children)
It's simple. If you are into gaming on Linux you go Nvidia. There is no choice. Anything else is a gamble whether they games you need will work.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:01AM
On linux, it's a gamble on whether any game will work! :) Just kidding... Please, really.... I love linux, some of my best operating systems have been linux. Ok, well, maybe some unix but close enough, ok?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:45AM (3 children)
"they games you need"
If you are so addicted to fashion that you really *need* a specific game so badly that you're buying your hardware based on it, then why wouldn't you just run Windows? This is what I don't get at all. What's the appeal to Linux?
It's not having a Free OS, because you don't have that anymore once you give Nvidia blobs root. If getting the currently popular games running is your primary reason for having the PC, then why would you try to run them on a platform that is not only not supported by most games, but ideologically hostile to them as well?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:04AM (2 children)
I'm pretty sure "games you need" is not a hard concept to understand, it has nothing to do with "popular".
Anyway, you are likely not a gamer if you are this confused. With nvidia on Linux it just works (most of the time anyway), with everything else it's "guess, pray and tweak until it does". Sometimes it just "only nvidia cards are supported, everything else – you are on your own".
Your "Free OS" argument might have applied if I used gNewSense or something. If you are going full scale war on proprietary you might as well nuke your BIOS and CPU. Have to draw a line somewhere if I want anything work at all.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:12AM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure it means that you *need* specific games.
In other words, that this is not an optional desire - it's a need - for a specific game from a specific source.
Which is why you have to work with what that specific source works with.
"Anyway, you are likely not a gamer if you are this confused."
I'm not at all confused, and I was likely a gamer before your father made the fatal mistake of looking at your mother.
"With nvidia on Linux it just works (most of the time anyway), with everything else it's "guess, pray and tweak until it does"."
Uhuh.
And what is "it" please?
The first occurrence of the word "it" in that sentence, to what noun does that pronoun refer?
"Sometimes it just "only nvidia cards are supported, everything else – you are on your own"."
And why does that matter to you, that sometimes someone might not support you?
What sort of support do you require?
"Your "Free OS" argument might have applied if I used gNewSense or something. If you are going full scale war on proprietary you might as well nuke your BIOS and CPU. Have to draw a line somewhere if I want anything work at all."
Work? What work? Weren't we talking about games?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @08:13PM
You could totally go back to lurking y'know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:59PM
Ugh. Yeah, I dropped $2000 on a System76 gaming laptop a couple years back. Tried really hard to game on that thing for a couple months, eventually I gave up and upgraded by desktop with all AMD so I could just use that instead, and now my laptop might as well be a chromebook because all it's good for is browsing the web.
The problem is that BOTH NVidia drivers are complete fucking garbage. Some games only work with Nouveau, some games only work with proprietary drivers, but as far as I can tell very few games will work with both. Which means nearly every time you want to play a different game, you've gotta go through a whole process of changing your graphics drivers. And praying that doing so doesn't screw up your system and that the game will actually work when you're done.
Have yet to find any games that won't run on my AMD system. I'm actually not even sure what drivers it's using -- I think the open source ones, but it might be running proprietary. I don't know, I don't care, because I've never had to mess with it. Everything just seems to work.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:01AM (9 children)
Oh, and what is this default you are speaking of? Even Debian has nvidia proprietary driver in its repository. You are just going to install it along with everything else after a minimal install, once. Ain't that how you install your system? Nobody plays on nouveau (ok, that's probably not completely true, but nonetheless).
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:23AM (4 children)
I've yet to see a system where nouveau *doesn't* lock the system on boot. Booting a freshly installed Linux typically involves rebooting from the installer disk or other live cd, so I can mount the root partition and add a blacklist entry for the nouveau driver.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:29AM (3 children)
My work desktop runs fine with Nouveau.
It went through a period that, after several weeks of use, I would see some odd effects when dragging windows from one monitor to another, but I haven't seen that problem for quite some time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:29AM (2 children)
Can I ask what card you're using? I've been having issues with, off the top of my head, 650, 760, 960, and 1050.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 420] (rev a1)
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday September 13 2018, @01:46AM
Ah, a real classic model, that could explain it :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:27AM (3 children)
That is inaccurate. Proprietary drivers are pretty easy to install on Debian, but Debian doesn't host those drivers. I use smxi to install my kernels and drivers - it's almost brain-dead simple. Going through the menus, you are given the option to install nvidia-latest. If you choose that option, then smxi connects directly to an nvidia server, to download the latest proprietary driver.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:19PM (2 children)
What? nvidia-driver, nvidia-kernel-dkms, etc. aren't actually drivers?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:40PM (1 child)
I haven't used nvidia-driver in quite a long while - isn't that just a script, which downloads the nvidia proprietary driver? Hell, let me just look to see what it is exactly . . .
So - you're installing a metapackage. What does the metapackage do, exactly? I suspect that it is grabbing the proprietary driver from an Nvidia server. I'm not absolutely sure about that. Someone who knows for sure, can confirm or correct that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:44AM
Metapackage doesn't do anything, it's a package to install other packages via its dependencies. Basically, you don't need nvidia servers in Debian, unless you want latest versions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:12AM
True. If you use Nvidia, use their proprietary driver. Nouveau still not there.
(Score: 5, Informative) by qzm on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:56AM (5 children)
Because you want OpenGL drivers that work, CUDA support, and the best performance per dollar?
Yes, I get exactly that you love free and open software, but some of use are actually doing work with tools we call computers, rather than trying to progress a political position.
And Intel, AMD, etal pretty much suck for anything other than the basics, unfortunately.
If you think they are at all feature complete, reliable, and fast then you are NOT running software that actually needs such cards, sorry.
And no, 'wayland' is not an example of software that needs a high end graphics card, even slightly.
Face it, ANY graphics card (hell, these days, a damn frame buffer) is more than enough for basic GUI work.
The rubber hits the road in other applications these days - you know, the types of things where dropping $1k+ on a video card actual makes sense.
And for those, NVidia delivers by FAR the best performance.
Your argument seems to be 'I dont want a drivers license, so no one should EVER buy a Ferrari, because I dont like having to have a drivers license!, you all should use pushbikes'
And you are dead wrong. Stop confusing politics with technical merit.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:29AM
Very well stated - thank you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:30AM
Note the article is directed towards gamers and even in the submission...
So with these caveats I agree with you, the article author may well agree with you too ;) I guess the argument could be summarized as "professional gamers aren't running linux and these cards are too expensive for casuals leaving the market as industrial / academic users and idiots"?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:04PM
Doesn't matter how good the performance is if the drivers are such garbage that they can't actually run the applications that you want to run.
I spent a hell of a long time with my laptop trying to get shit working with the piece of garbage NVidia card. I install proprietary drivers, and I get error messages that the app crashed and I should be using the Nouveau drivers. So I switch to the Nouveau drivers, and apps that were working fine with the proprietary drivers no longer work. So then every time you get a new game or other graphically demanding app, you try it, and then if it doesn't work you go through the whole process of reinstalling your graphics drivers and praying that fixes it...and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes you're just screwed.
Never had an issue with my AMD cards though. I literally don't even know which drivers I have installed, because I haven't needed to. It just works. Everything I throw at it just works. Maybe the performance isn't quite as good, but I don't care because all the performance in the world isn't worth shit if I can't actually use any of it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:18PM (1 child)
Freedom is more important than technical merit. Until people understand that, our world is going to continue to be filled with proprietary black boxes that abuse, spy on, and restrict users. And those are not avoidable even to people like Richard Stallman, since any businesses he deals with probably use such abusive black boxes.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:16AM
Great, could you please give me your home address and a copy of the keys to your front door?
After all, Freedom!
Oh, you meant freedom for YOU, I see...