this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
79 points (96.5% liked)

Linux

58970 readers
839 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I have this question. I see people, with some frequency, sugar coating the Nvidia GPU marriage with Linux. I get that if you already have a Nvidia GPU or you need CUDA or work with AI and want to use Linux that is possible. Nevertheless, this still a very questionable relationship.

Shouldn’t we be raising awareness about in case one plan to game titles that uses DX12? I mean 15% to 30% performance loss using Nvidia compared to Windows, over 5% to 15% and some times same performance or better using AMD isn't something to be alerting others?

I know we wanna get more people on Linux, and NVIDIA’s getting better, but don’t we need some real talk about this? Or is there some secret plan to scare people away from Linux that I missed?

Am I misinformed? Is there some strong reason to buy a Nvidia GPU if your focus is gaming in Linux?

Edit: I'm adding some links with the issue in question because I see some comments talking about Nvidia to be working flawless:

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nr4tva/does_the_nvidia_dx12_bug_20ish_performance_loss/

Please let me know if this is already fixed on Nvidia GPUs for gaming in Linux.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] data1701d@startrek.website 50 points 6 days ago (13 children)

I feel like most people who use Nvidia on Linux just got their machine before they were Linux users, with a small subset for ML stuff.

Honestly, I hear ROCm may finally be getting less horrible, is getting wider distro support, and supports more GPUs than it used to, so I really hope AMD will become as livable ML dev platform as it is a desktop GPU.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Yep, that'd be me. That said if I were to buy a new GPU today (well, tomorrow, waiting on Valve announcement for its next HMD) I might still get an NVIDIA because even though I'm convinced 99% of LLM/GenAI is pure hype, if 1% might be useful, might be built ethically and might run on my hardware, I'd be annoyed if it wouldn't because ROCm is just a tech demo but is too far performance wise. That'd say the percentage is so ridiculously low I'd probably pick the card which treats the open ecosystem best.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 2 points 6 days ago

From what I've heard, ROCm may be finally getting out of its infancy; at the very least, I think by the time we get something useful, local, and ethical, it will be pretty well-developed.

Honestly, though, I'm in the same boat as you and actively try to avoid most AI stuff on my laptop. The only "AI" thing I use is I occasionally do an image upscale. I find it kind of useless on photos, but it's sometimes helpful when doing vector traces on bitmap graphics with flat colors; Inkscape's results aren't always good with lower resolution images, so putting that specific kind of graphic through "cartoon mode" upscales sometimes improves results dramatically for me.

Of course, I don't have GPU ML acceleration, so it just runs on the CPU; it's a bit slow, but still less than 10 minutes.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)