1y ago

Going from nvidia to amd

As many already know, nvidia is not the best choice for linux and amd is always recommend when it is brought up, so here id like to ask an equivalent to my graphics card in amd, i know nothing about amd and dont really know where to start honestly.

GPU: gtx 1660 super processor: 11th gen i5-11400 2.60hgz x 6

what would be a similar or better choice from amd in terms of gpu that maybe doesnt cost an arm and a leg? Do nvidia or amd matter in terms of games?

any help would be very appreciated

56 comments

I made the swap from Nvidia to AMD without getting a more powerful card. It just isn't worth it. Sure, the fact that I can use Wayland and open source drivers is nice, but you don't gain any extra performance. I would wait until you are ready to upgrade your card and just get and AMD card at that point.
- Thats....the point of this post? What is an equivalent or upgrade in your opinion that doesnt cost an arm and a leg?
  
  I don't understand this community... it's like discussion can't be had because people's opinions of linux get in the way of it somehow.
  I don't have any expertise here or I would offer my thoughts. Just frustrated to see the top comments not being helpful at all.
  
  Your post makes it sound like you want to make a swap from a 1660 to something with similar power on the AMD side, not upgrading. If you want something cheap from AMD, the 6600 would be a decent power bump for not too much.
- You don't gain performance, you gain support and stability.

Keep using your Nvidia card, it is still good enough for 1080p gaming.
In general Nvidia is better on ray-tracing and upscaling to 4k, but AMD is catching up quickly on the latter. Nvidia is also better for AI, but that isn't so relevant for you I guess.
- However, if you are set on upgrading, I'd look at any of their 6000 series, from the 6600 on up to the 6950XT. I don't recommend anything below the 6600 from that generation. Since you didn't give a price range, I gave you a GPU range. All of those GPU's are getting heavy discounts and they're all solid cards. Only thing to note is if you go for the 6800XT and above to make sure your power supply can handle it. While they weren't as bad as Nvidia, they could still suck down power.
  I think I would personally recommend the 6700XT. I believe it has 12 GB of VRAM which will help it last longer in the coming years. 8 GB just doesn't cut it anymore.
  
  ill keep an eye on the 6800xt than, maybe once it doesnt cost an arm ill get one, thanks
- The context of this post is Linux on AMD cards, is there any support at all for raytracing or upscaling of any sort on Linux on either AMD or Nvidia? Serious question.
  
  Sure, both works fine on Linux, however ray tracing performance on AMD is especially bad with Linux right now.
- 10-series cards have degraded dx12 performance on Linux, though (and likely always will).
  Low D3D12 performance on Nvidia Pascal (and older) GPUs is expected and likely won't improve much. The hardware has a bunch of limitations that make it very hard to extract good performance. Turing fares better, but only AMD actually runs reasonably well right now.
  So depending on what OP plays, it might even be necessary to upgrade if they want to play dx12 games on Linux.
- Also Nvidia is still better for general computing (e.g. openCL). That may change when rustiCL finally catches up, but AMD implementation of openCL always gives problems.

As others mentioned, 6600 / 6650 would be a good upgrade for you at about the $200 price point, possibly a little lower. If you can find a 6600XT it's also a good choice. Personally that's what I'm running and it's quite good for 1080p -- IIRC it's slightly better on average than a 3060.
Yes, ray tracing isn't great on AMD, and it's unsupported on Linux unless you use the bleeding edge MESA driver. But, ray tracing is ray tracing -- I've never really seen the difference to be worth worrying about.

Something like the 6600 or 6600xt(or 6650xt) could be the cheap alternative you are looking for as they cost around 200 dollars and give a decent performance bump for you.
A used 5600xt would be a much cheaper but somewhat sideways upgrade as it sells for around 100 dollars(according to Hardware Unboxed's last gpu pricing video) and offers a small performance improvement of 5-10%.
Side note - in my view, the sideways upgrade to AMD from nvidia may not be the smartest use of money. AMD's advantages over nvidia are real but unless you really do need a new GPU(because you are using the 1660 super for another rig or giving it to someone), the advantages are nowhere near large enough to justify buying a new GPU of around the same performance level. Of course this is just my viewpoint and you might see things differently

Just did the same process 3080 -> 7900xtx.
I uninstalled the Nvidia drivers, shut down, and installed the AMD card and it's all just worked.
I'm not sure the balance, but the RX 6600 should be a great boost. The 7600 xt seems like a solid card, but it's among the current geb overpriced cards.
Also, speaking from experience, amdgpu has some freezing issues on the 7xxx cards. I had to add a kernel arg to mitigate the freezing.
We just got a new mesa on fedora this week and it's improved a lot.
- The RX 6600 and 7600 are only 8GB cards. I wouldn't consider getting anything with less than 12GB for gaming now.
  Also keep in mind that DXVK increases VRAM usage.

This isn't super relevant, but I just installed Windows on one of my drives so I could play Tarkov (lol), and oh my god the AMD Adrenalin software. I'm sure there's some okay features with it, but for some reason it was not saving my fan tuning. So like, during intensive graphics, my PC was just overheating like crazy, and would just randomly shut off multiple times and not turn on for a few minutes. Every time I rebooted, I would have to launch Adrenalin and load my fan tuning configuration. It's absolutely atrocious that this happens on a default Windows install.... like if it happened on Linux I'd accept that I maybe configured something wrong. But installing Windows and AMD drivers should not put my computer at risk of burning my GPU. It's ridiculous.
Anyway if anyone else has this issue, you can fix it by turning off fast boot in Windows power settings. Stupid af
- I know of someone who wanted to dualboot for certain games and their windows did exactly that too. At one point their AMD driver managed to uninstall itself somehow. On Linux they never had any problem whatsoever.
  
  At one point their AMD driver managed to uninstall itself somehow.
  Yup, that's windows. AMD tends to release most of their drivers without WHQL certification (think, final drivers, just without Microsoft signing off on them, so they get out faster and (presumably) slightly cheaper).
  Windows sees this and thinks "Hey! This driver doesn't have our stamp of approval! Let's help this dumb user out and 'update' it to the latest one that does!"
  Unfortunately, this not only puts you on an old version, but now the adrenalin software sees that the driver doesnt match its install and doesn't let you use those features.
  God I hate windows >.>

RX 6700's can be found new for $280, either that or a 6700xt for $~320-330 would be my recommendation.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1660-super.c3458
The relative performance table below the specs can help you. The cheapest you can get right now is a rx 6600 dipping below 200 $/€, but the 6600xt 6650 6700 6700xt are also viable. The 66xx range is enough for 1080p, 1440p begins with the 6700 becausa it has a 10gb vram buffer and wider pci bus.

one thing to keep in mind is that both brands align with each others in terms of msrp/performance, the differences at the same price-points are very marginal, where the prices go wild is in the manufacturer's (evga, asus, sapphire...) retail price, so if you have to compare two cards, do it with the msrp of the base models and then try to find a model which is close to it, just make sure the model you pick doesn't have an habit of blowing up and you'll be good to go, trying to optimize your choice reading hundreds of benchmarks is a pain that's won't net you much.
edit: you might be interested in moore's law Is dead chart, the dude's insufferable but the chart is pretty good.
- Msrp?
  Idk moores law is dead but this is the second time.I see this list, thank you for your help but this list doesn't mean anything to me, its confusing to look at
  
  msrp is the price that the manufacturer say the card should be sold at, usually it is lower than the actual price depending on the supply and demand and on how much the retailer want/can make on top of the base price
  For the chart, it's readable this way:
  the higher ↑ a gpu is on the list , the stronger it is. you can see that being on top of all the others, the amd rx 7900xtx, nvidia rtx 4080 and nvidia rtx 4090 24gb, are the most powerful gpu's of the chart, the best one of the 3 being the nvidia rtx 4090 since it is above all
  you have 3 big columns one for amd, one for nvidia and one for intel.
  wen a gpu is on the same horizontal line as another, even across the columns, that means they perform roughly the same.
  For example:
  the nvidia gtx 1660s that you have is on the same line as the:
  amd vega 56, nvidia rtx 3050, nvidia gtx 1660Ti, nvidia gtx 1070Ti and the intel A580
  So all of those perform roughly the same, if you go one line above, those the cards on the line will perform slightly better, 2 lines, a little better, 10 lines, much better etc
  you can see with the chart that the closest modern amd gpu to your nvidia gtx 1660s is the amd rx 5600xt, but since it's only one line above the one you have, it is only going to be slightly better than the one you have.
  what you should do is open the shop on which you want to buy the card and find the card that is the highest on the list in the amd collumn that you can afford.

Worth it just to not have to deal with random NVIDIA dkms nonsense, honestly, but I'm also strongly religiously motivated that the driver must be open source.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

I switched from NVIDIA to AMD for the same reasons. Better compatibility with linux. Worst decision of my life. AMD is still far from NVIDIA in too many ways. Rocm is a total piece of shit and very few programs support it. Gaming performance is meh.
So I had to spend even more money to switch back to a 4070.
The best card you can buy right now for perf/$ ratio is the RTX 4070. You won't regret that purchase. Or you can continue to delude yourself that AMD gpus are good now (they aren't, but maybe one day)
- lmao sure buddy, let me just quickly shell out over half a grand for an overpriced card, i also never claimed amd is certifiably better, or worse, im simply asking a question here dude, whats your problem?
  someones biased methinks

56 comments