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).
DONT get an nvidia GPU.
It works but its a nightmare sometimes. The drivers are still bad. Dont’t.
-nvidia user
I REGRET buying an nvidia adapter when I had the opportunity to buy an AMD/Radeon adapter.
During the pandemic, I purchased an GeForce GTX 1650. It’s an older, Turing hardware-based card, so you’d think the driver support would be pretty mature, right? It has been NOTHING but problems.
On nouveau, it’s stable, but 3d acceleration just doesn’t work right. Under the nvidia open source driver, it corrupts the screen after boot and locks up entirely second later. Under the proprietary driver, it freezes on boot a good amount of the time.
Now, once I get it booted, it’s solid as a rock. I’ve gotta crank the engine over five or six times every time I DO boot, though. If I had it to do over again, I’d definitely have stuck with AMD.
Sounds similar to my most recent Nvidia experience.
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.
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.
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.
Linux noob here. Why do people refuse to use the proprietary driver? I did not had any seriousl issue with my 2080ti on Nobara. I can game and edit videos with better performances than in windows with same pc
A few reasons:
- There is a strong desire to see if there is secret sauce in the driver that makes their cards so darn performant. Could it be applied to other video drivers?
- To audit for vulnerabilities and fix them.
- To allow the driver to use some kernel internals that the kernel developers keep trying to wall proprietary drivers off from.
- Ideology
- Community might be able to hack it to work better with Wayland, since the Wayland team has no interest in extending any kind of support to proprietary driver driving GPU’s… despite x11 working just fine forever. … see Ideology.
I have had so many issues with Nvidia drivers, especially on laptops with Optimus. Black screens after booting, random breakage when updating, having to fuck around with OpenGL libraries all the time when you have integrated Intel graphics and Nvidia graphics on the same system. It’s just a pain for me on laptops.
Wouldn’t be such a big issue on a desktop, but I’ve had a work-provided workstation with an Nvidia and 99% of the time if something broke on that machine, it was because Nvidia wasn’t compatible with some updated kernel or libraries.
Intel and AMD have both provided us with a painless driver experience that just works out of the box all the time and is integrated in all the open source things (mainly the Linux kernel and the Mesa libraries for OpenGL & Vulkan). With Nvidia, you need to throw all that out and use their proprietary blobs for OpenGL and Vulkan.
Also, I just think Nvidia is a scumbag company, trying to force single-vendor proprietary solutions on the market by abusing their dominant position (pushing CUDA while refusing to implement any new OpenCL version for over a decade, so software vendors couldn’t just pick a competitive open alternative is one example, the original G-Sync is another). I prefer not to give them any money if I can help it.
