Hi all,
I’m in the market for a new big desktop replacement gaming laptop, and looking at the market there are almost exclusively Nvidia powered.
I was wondering about the state of their new open-source driver. Can I run a plain vanilla kernel with only open source / upstream packages and drivers and expect to get a good experience? How is battery life, performance? Does DRI Prime and Vulkan based GPU selection “just work”?
The only alternative new for my market is a device with an Intel Arc A730M, which I currently think is going to be the one I end up buying.
If you want to do anything serious with 3D in linux you need to use an AMD chipset. Intel sucks. Nvidia sucks.
It’s not complicated – Intel only cares about business so their mesa implementation in Linux is a tragedy. Nvidia only cares about CUDA so their drivers are closed sourced a buggy as fuck.
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What makes you say Intel sucks? The A730M should be somewhere between an RTX 3060 and 3070 but with 12GB of VRAM. From my experience with Intel iGPUs, the software experience is very nice, so I just expect the same thing but with faster performance.
I’ve tried an A730M laptop last year when they were new, and the drivers worked fine, everything was working out of the box. The only issue was that performance was not stable and power usage was high, but I’m assuming performance will only have improved with 12 months of driver engineering from Intel.
These cards have been out for years…
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpu-drivers/intels-new-gpu-drivers-boost-performance-up-to-750-in-dx11
If you’re re-writing drivers and getting a 50% boost in performance, your implementation is fucking tragic.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-23.0.2-Released
This mesa release had a draw bug for intel GPUs that was over 2 years old.
It’s BAD bad in Intel land. I want them to be good, but they just are not.
Just get an AMD card and be done with it. Making things unnecessarily complicated is something us engineers do for fun because we enjoy the headaches, not because we’re trying to play Starfield.