Hey all! This is my first post, so I’m sorry if anything is formatted incorrectly or if this is the wrong place to ask this. Recently I’ve saved up enough to upgrade my graphics card ($350 budget). I’ve heard great things about amd on linux and appreciate open source drivers so as to not be at the mercy of nvidia. My first choice of graphics card was a 6700xt, but then I heard that nvidia had significantly higher performance in terms of workstation tasks (not to mention the benefits of cuda and nvenc) and have been looking into a 3060 or 3060 ti. I do a bit of gaming in my free time, but its not my top priority, and I can almost guarantee that any option in this price range will be more than enough for the games I play. Ultimately my questions come down to:
- Would nvida or amd provide more raw performance on linux for my price range?
- Which would be better for productivity cuda encoding etc. (I mainly use blender, freecad, and solidworks, but I appreciate having extra features for any software that I may use in the future).
- What option would work best after a few years? (I’ve seen amd increase rheir performance with driver updates before, but the nvk driver also looks promising. I also host some servers and tend to cycle my componenta from my main system into my proxmox cluster).
Also a bit more details to hopefully help with any missing info: My current system is a Ryzen 7 3700x, gtx 1050 ti, 32gb ram, 850 watt psu, and nvme ssd. I’ve only ever used nvidia cards, but amd looks like a great alternative. As another side note, if there’s any way to run cuda apps on amd I plan on running my new gpu alongside my old one so nvenc is not too much of a concern.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or ideas!
Edit 1: thanks so much for all of the feedback! I’m not going to purchase a gpu quite yet but probably in a few weeks. First I’ll be testing wayland with my 1050 ti and just researching how much I need each feature of each gpu. Thanks again for all of your feedback, I’ll update the post when I do order said gpu.
Edit 2: I made an interesting decision and actually got the arc a770. I’d be happy to discuss exactly why, and some of the pros and cons so far, but I do plan on eventually compiling a more in depth review somewhere sometime.
I am assuming you currently use linux. Do you currently use CUDA with freecad and solidworks(which I am assuming you use through WINE or a VM). AMD generally has better raw performance at same price but has nothing equivalent to CUDA at this point. There is ROCm and plans for CUDA through ROCm but GPU support for ROCm is hit or miss. You also have openCL but performance is nowhere near as good as using CUDA even if the GPU using CUDA is weaker. AMD. will provide a much better gaming and day to day usage experience though
I dual boot debian and arch with debian being primarily for workstation tasks and arch being for gaming and any software I want a more recent version of (kicad). It sounds like freecad is mostly cpu bound, and I haven’t used solidworks at all yet (I may take a mechanical engineering class where they’ll be using it). Considering amd is higher performing in raw power can ROCm be good enough to work as I wait for it to catch up to cuda?
There is also an availability problem. Only select few AMD GPUs support ROCm. There are ways to get it for unsupported GPUs but I don’t use ROCm so I don’t have much idea of how that works. You will have to ask somebody else about that. My point is if your need for CUDA is sure and solid, but an nvidia GPU. Also do check out if solidworks can be made to run on linux because it may not work using wine and there is no native version.