It’s more of “NVIDIA bad” than “AMD good”. AMD does what is expected in the Linux world, to make open source drivers that are part of the Mesa project. That shouldn’t be an amazing feat of awesomeness, that should just be standard procedure. However, when the competition is so horrifically bad at drivers on Linux, following the standard makes AMD look amazing. For what it’s worth, I have an Intel Arc A770 on my Linux setup and it works great. Intel also follows the standard procedure of making their drivers open and part of the Mesa project. However, AMD has been in the graphics card (and driver) game for much longer and their drivers have a lot more optimization, plus Valve has put work into making AMD’s drivers better for gaming workloads over the past several years (especially given the Steam Deck runs an AMD GPU). Hopefully Intel gets more performance parity with AMD in the Linux driver world as time goes on. It’s definitely gotten much better since launch already.

As for NVIDIA, maybe NVK can make them even sort of useful without the nasty proprietary drivers but reverse engineered drivers are always going to take longer to get anywhere near the same performance of ones written based on actual official documentation.

You can’t really use Wayland with Nvidia. Whether it’ll ever be possible will be up to Nvidia…if they release open source drivers, then it will. Otherwise, no chance. I have a 3080 and use Manjaro XFCE. Gaming is nearly flawless. But it’s not Wayland.

Couldn’t judge sunshine etc. as I don’t stream.

Generally, I’d say you’ll do much better with AMD on Linux, if you don’t rely on Nvidia specific features.

I haven’t read anything you wrote other than the title, but yes AMD is so much better, everything just works, nothing breaks with updates, no weird quirks,… It’s just so much QoL you get by using AMD

Is AMD really that much better?

As someone who swapped out their RTX 3060 for an RX 6900 XT, yes, yes it is. Everything. Just. Works. Display sync, high refresh rate, Wayland, Source games (yeah some native source games just won’t play nice on NVIDIA randomly, lmao), driver installation (or lack thereof). It’s just a WAY better experience, especially not having to track down and install NVIDIA’s drivers. Seriously, you don’t realize how much of a convoluted (and frustratingly distro-specific) process it is until you switch to AMD.

NVIDIA will play nice if you put in ALL the work it needs to behave, X11, proprietary drivers, etc. Don’t play by its rules? Then Jensen Huang himself put a pipe bomb under your pillow. If you don’t mind catering your setup to NVIDIA, then you won’t really notice a difference. I mean, in all fairness I now cater my hardware to Linux, buying only AMD/Intel GPUs, so I can’t judge.

From a FOSS standpoint, AMD is clearly better since Nvidia doesn’t provide an open source driver and actively prevents one from being developed (that is feature complete) by anyone else.

From a gaming standpoint, I don’t think it makes much difference either way. Both companies make cards and have drivers that work very well for Linux gaming. Nvidia are usually a bit faster at supporting new cards on Linux, but that only matters if you are buying a card right at launch.

The main sticking point is Wayland vs Xorg. While you CAN use an Nvidia card for Wayland at this point, you are likely to run into some issues and it won’t be as nice of an experience as AMD. Nvidia will probably fully support Wayland eventually, but there is no guarantee.

Finally, if you need CUDA you just go with Nvidia.

It really comes down to your exact needs and how much you care about open source software as a principle.

When i had Nvidia, i had to install the latest driver always manually, booting RL3 in console and install the new driver “by hand”. Under the bottom, i was happy with my Nvidia card, but i switched to AMD not even a year ago. Since then, “it just works” :)

Nvidia drivers have (slightly) more timely support for the latest cards, and more mature support for non-3D uses of the GPU, especially scientific computing. To a large extent they are the same code as the Windows drivers, and that has positives in terms of breadth and maturity of support.

For everything else, the AMD drivers are better. Because they are a separate codebase from the Windows drivers, and are part of the de-facto Linux GPU driver stack Mesa, they integrate much better into the overall Linux experience, especially around support for Wayland. Unless you have an absolutely bleeding-edge card, they “just work” more often than the Nvidia drivers. If you like doing serious tinkering on your Linux system, then the AMD drivers being fully integrated and having the source available is a major win. Also, it used to be that the Nvidia drivers did a much better job of squeezing performance out of the hardware, but today there’s very little in it, and the AMD drivers might even be a little more efficient.

I’ve got both AMD and Nvidia GPUs currently in different machines, and I much prefer the Linux experience with AMD. I don’t think I’ll be buying another Nvidia GPU unless the driver situation changes significantly.

FWIW I don’t stream so I can’t comment on the exact situation, but I have used the video encode hardware on AMD cards via VAAPI and it was competent and much faster than x264/x265 on the CPU. I think OBS has a plugin to use VAAPI (which is the “standard” Linux video decode/encode acceleration interface that everyone but Nvidia supports).

Been using AMD and arch for like a decade, and I don’t remember of any major issues of note.

The only exception is with some issues related to my old 1700x which caused Bluetooth issues and OS freezes sometimes. Zero issues since switching to a 3700