Hi all, I have transitioned my desktop PC to linux and am really liking it so far. I recently bought Oblivion Eemastered, but it seems like it’s too much for my old 1060 6gb to handle. So now I’m looking at what options are available - and would obviously like to get an option that works well with Linux. Since I don’t game as much anymore, I don’t think I can justify spending much more than €300 on it. I haven’t looked at the GPU market for 8 years now, so I don’t know what’s going. What advice do you people have? I have looked at the 4060, the 7600 and the 7600XT, but not sure if they are good value, I’m getting mixed info online.
I appreciate any help and advice you people have.
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For Linux I would recommend AMD or Intel GPUs. They are less hassle getting up and running.
I’m currently running an Intel Arc A770 and its been running great. Was a lot more affordable than recent AMD or Nvidia cards.
I have personally seen more support for AMD GPUs during my research into Linux compatibility. I would love to hear your take on the Intel side. In your experience, how would you rate your Intel GPU experience with Linux gaming?
Getting it up and running was as simple as swapping my AMD RX580 for the Intel Arc A770. The drivers are open source and built into the kernel and Mesa. It picked up and started working without issues.
Its ran every game I have smoothly at max settings. I haven’t had to turn down the graphics settings on a game yet. Though to be fair, the most graphic intensive game I play is No Man’s Sky.
Only issue I encountered was when I first got it I had to tell No Man’s Sky to use the Xe Vulkan support, instead of trying to use the old Intel HD version. Since then I’ve reinstalled No Man’s Sky a few times. Newer updates properly detect the Vulkan support.
I was impressed enough with its performance that I bought a second to upgrade my wife’s computer. She has been using that system to do modeling in Blender and hasn’t had any issues with it that I’ve heard of.
I have been quite happy with the Intel Arc card. If they are still making them when I do my next upgrade I will likely get another.
Have the A750, bought it for a combination of experimenting and the incredible vaapi encoding support.
It’s a monster overall, works great with ollama too, only thing I couldn’t get working was the actual graphics for wayland somehow, but that also wasn’t my priority.
Thanks for sharing! I personally had only heard of AMD so far for Linux gaming, so I appreciate the information.
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It depends on the use. AMD for gaming, sure. For machine learning I would go with nvidia again. I run it on arch, which updates very often.
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you can run local models with 16GB VRAM, but I’m not sure most models will run at all on an AMD card
When catching up with hardware performance for Linux gaming, I always browse phoronix, try to find a few comparisons from different years to see how the card looked like in comparison to other options. There might be some sleepers now no-one remembers about, that you magically have an option to buy. Think which game in the comparisons might have similar requirements to what you want to play and see how the card/cpu did on the settings you find agreeable/non-agreeable/perfect
Don’t go into its forum, though. There be dragons
Maybe recently it started to change with NVIDIA opening their drivers but for years we’ve been second class citizens for them. Personally I say “fuck NVIDIA”
If you decide to go AMD, definitely explore the landscape of fan controllers. I use corectl but maybe you would prefer something else (this is Arch wiki, but should be fine for other distros too)
I would try to go for a used 6800XT, I snatched one at 320€ some months ago, it should be easy to find now for 300€. If you want performance for your money, and you use Linux, that would be my way to go.
I don’t have much to add to your search, but I’m in the exact same situation almost down to the card and also looking for an upgrade. The only advice I have so far is to go for team Red, AMD seems to be so, so much better to use on Linux than Nvidia.
Intel B580, hands down is the best bang for your bucks.
Check the performance per dollar charts here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/gainward-geforce-rtx-5060-ti-8-gb/35.html and pick a GPU that’s not from NVIDIA. Or this https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-9070-xt-nitro/36.html. AMD 6800, 6800 XT, 7700 XT, but you can also wait for 9060 and 9060 XT.
AMD is generally less trouble on Linux, but if you’ve been happy with your 1060 on Linux, then it doesn’t matter a ton. AMD tends to have a bit more bang for your buck in terms of raster performance (i.e. don’t expect raytracing and whatnot to work well on mid-tier AMD), which is fine for most things.
Look up perf differences for those cards in games you care about, and all else being equal, pick the one with more RAM. The 7600XT has 16GB, so that’s what I’d default to.
I’m on a 6650XT and it’s great. My SO is on a 6700XT. Maybe one of those is a better deal in your area?
