Uh oh,

I should have known what I'd step into simply asking which vendor was
recommended. Imprecise questions like these often lead to holy wars...
Vi/Emacs, Gnome/KDE, AMD/Nvidia, and so on. But it's encouraging to see
that discussions on this list stay civil :-)

I'm not a big fan of Nvidia's past unwillingness to work with the kernel
community and bring truly open drivers to Linux. AMD seems to do a lot
better these days. But...

There doesn't seem to be a truly open option right now that supports the
newest cards. Even ROCm, which is open source, doesn't support the new
5700 XT cards, afaict.

I'll try to summarise what info I think I've got so far:

AMD:
* slightly lower performance at the high end
* definitely cheaper than high-end Nvidia
* someone mentioned power consumption, but I think with the latest cards
  that has been reigned in
* open-source option (ROCm) though not for the most recent cards
* from personal experience: getting the AMDGPU-pro drivers to run on
  Debian Sid (which is what I'm using) can be a pain

Nvidia:
* better performance, especially if money is not the deciding factor
* more expensive
* no open-source option to speak of, but binary drivers seem to work
  well enough

However, both should work well for darktable once the drivers are
running.

I wish I could go with Intel, since they at least have completely open
drivers, but performance is abbysmal. That's once reason I asked my
original question.

If anyone has anything substantial to add that I have overlooked, feel
free to comment further. I think I've made my decision, though.

Thanks everyone for the help.


Cheers,
Chris

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:23:47AM +0200, Fabien Engels wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The issue comes from Nvidia politic that makes Open source developers life a 
> nightmare. Some information you can fin here :
> - https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
> - https://www.wired.com/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia-linux/
> 
> I read that things start to change as Nvidia started to provide some 
> documentation to help the Nouveau Project (Open source driver for Nvidia made 
> by the community) but a lot of things are not shared (like how to manage 
> power consumption).
> 
> So yes, as users of distribution like Ubuntu, Mint and etc, you'll ever see 
> any issue because they are hidden thanks to the work provided by distribution 
> maintainers.
> 
> Let's hope, Nvidia will change its mind and start to real cooperate with the 
> community.
> 
> -- 
>   Fabien Engels
>   [email protected]
> 
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019, at 10:11, thokster wrote:
> > Am 16.09.19 um 07:57 schrieb Matthias Bodenbinder:
> > > I am using NVIDIA cards since decades. Very nice.
> > > I can not understand the NVIDIA bashing I read every now and then. I used 
> > > NVIDIA cards with debian, Mint and now Manjaro without issue.

-- 
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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