I have currently a RX 6700XT and I’m quite happy with it when it comes to gaming and regular desktop usage, but was recently doing some local ML stuff and was just made aware of huge gap NVIDIA has over AMD in that space.
But yeah, going back to NVIDIA (I used to run 1080) after going AMD… seems kinda dirty for me ;-; Was very happy to move to AMD and be finally be free from the walled garden.
I thought at first to just buy a second GPU and still use my 6700XT for gaming and just use NVIDIA for ML, but unfortunately my motherboard doesn’t have 2 PCIe slots I could use for GPUs, so I need to choose. I would be able to buy used RTX 3090 for a fair price, since I don’t want to go for current gen, because of the current pricing.
So my question is how is NVIDIA nowadays? I specifically mean Wayland compatibility, since I just recently switched and would suck to go back to Xorg. Other than that, are there any hurdles, issues, annoyances, or is it smooth and seamless nowadays? Would you upgrade in my case?
EDIT: Forgot to mention, I’m currently using GNOME on Arch(btw), since that might be relevant
Better, but still shit. The main holdup right now to what I see is wayland-protocols and the WMs adding Explicit Sync support as the proprietary driver does not have implicit sync support. Its part of a larger move for the graphics stack to move to explicit sync:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90
Once this is in, the flickering issues will be solved and NVIDIA wayland being a daily driver in most situations
Yeah, was just reading about it and it kind of sucks, since one of the main reasons I wanted to go Wayland was multi-monitor VRR and I can see it is also an issue without explicit sync :/
Yeah. I have a multi-monitor VRR setup as well and happened to have a 3090 and not being able to take advantage of Wayland really sucks. And its not like Xorg is any good in that department either so you’re just stuck between a rock and a hard place until explicit sync is in
Lets see what will happen first- me getting a 7900xtx or this protocol being merged
I haven’t kept up with the explicit sync support since I eventually did migrate over to AMD in October after the 545 Nvidia driver came out and didn’t impress me at all - however I did hear in passing that you can get the explicit sync patch already in some ways, just a quick search reveals that Arch has this in the AUR already as
xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync-gitand that Nobara might already have it (I can’t find official confirmation on this).I noticed there was also some debate as to whether you would need a patched version of the compositor as well - but someone claims that just the XWayland patch worked for them (links to Reddit, as a heads up).
So your mileage may vary and it might require a varying level of work depending on what distro you run, however it might be worth looking into a bit more.
The patches exist for Wayland/Xwayland but the Compositor itself has to be patched as well for it to completely work. KDE does not have its fix for explicit sync merged in yet so its not patched as of Plasma 6.0.1. It did make things slightly better but all it did was make the flickering less frequent, but its still there.
I see, well hopefully it’ll get merged in the various compositors soon then! Wayland was a non-starter for me with that issue, and is precisely what led me to AMD.
Now I’m actually considering that one as well. Or I’ll wait a generation I guess, since maybe by then Radeon will at least be comparable to NVIDIA in terms of compute/ML.
Damn you NVIDIA
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Same here, but it turned out a lot of frameworks like tensorflow or pytorch do support AMD ROCm framework. I managed to run most models just by installing a rocm version of these dependencies instead of the default one.
Yeah, I’m currently using that one, and I would happily stick with it, but it seems just AMD hardware isn’t up to par with Nvidia when it comes to ML
Just take a look at the benchmarks for stable diffusion:
Plasma 6(arch) is pretty excellent. There is the bug mentioned in other comments with Xwayland that won’t be (fully) fixed until the Explicit sync wayland protocol is finalized and implemented, but that should apply to any wayland compositor.
As to wayland vs x11, if you want to game or anything else that is only X11, use X11, otherwise most everything else can be use wayland.
Thank you. My laptop is EndeavourOS+KDE6 - which is solid - and I’ve spent today preparing to nuke my gaming desktop PC (Ubuntu and an Nvidia RTX card) to rebuild it with Endeavour tomorrow, and the only doubt I had was Wayland and Nvidia with Lutris/Heroic/Proton gaming.
I have an Nvidia 3080TI and an AMD RX 7900 XTX.
The AMD runs great on any distro, I love it. The Nvidia is so much of a huge pain that I installed Windows on that PC.
Are you from the future? Please tell us more about the RDNA4 architecture if so :)
Oops, typo. 7900 🤣 edited. Thx for the heads up.
It depends. GNOME on Wayland + Nvidia runs great. But if you try the tiling manager camp, you will run into several issues in sway, hyprland. Things like having to use software mouse because insert nvidia excuse and high cpu usage by just moving the mouse.
Well… I don’t know, I would recommend GNOME on Wayland or maybe KDE, haven’t tried the latest Plasma 6 release, but outside that, avoid it.
high cpu usage by just moving the mouse.
This sounds like co-operative multi-tasking on a single CPU. I remember this with Windows 3.1x around 30 years ago, where the faster you moved your mouse, the more impact it would have on anything else you were running. That text scrolling too fast? Wiggle the mouse to slow it down (etc, etc).
I thought we’d permanently moved on with pre-emptive multi-tasking, multi-threading and multiple cores… 🤦🏼♂️
Mostly good, though I’ve got a bug on my desktop. It’s a two monitor setup and if I am running a game like Minecraft full screen on the second display and close out the game Plasma crashes to the login screen. Works fine if I disable the second display. That system is running Plasma 5 - Wayland on Nixos 23.11.
Otherwise, I occasionally run into an app that just doesn’t work, but that’s about all. Sometimes it’s a Plasma on Wayland thing (like with Element) sometimes not.
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