Linux

Do you do AI stuff?

I've heard NVidia is better for AI

For gaming, you'll probably not notice a difference. If anything, you'll be happy due to not having to wrestle NVidia Linux Drivers :P

I just did this with an RX7900TX and everything worked fine and I decided to install my normal updates. And then my PC wouldn't boot. After hours of "fun", it turns out that the issue had nothing to do with the GPU swap and all. Tons of fun!

The drivers are infinitely better, and the stutter when creating a ton of windows (ie notification spam from kconnect) is basically gone.

Rocm

Only that your newfound time from not having to fuck with video drivers might be enough to solve world peace.

Went from GTX970 to 6800XT.
Just drivers!

A while back I swapped out my crusty old GTX 960 for a RX 7600 and honestly, other than removing the old nvidia drivers and installing the Vulkan drivers, I had to do nothing else and I have 0 issues or complaints.

In case others are interested on the general compute aspect, e.g inference for self hosted AI, here is something related I found :

• ZLUDA, for CUDA everywhere, https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/ unfortunately in the process of a major rewrite https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/discussions/261 due to AMD (somehow?!) not wanting their code being used in there (maybe they did some shady RE on NVIDIA work?)
• AMD ROCm https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm and HIP https://github.com/ROCm/HIP

I recently did this switch to the same card and it sounds like it was as painless for you as it was for me.

An issue I had later on was that I still had some Nvidia packeges installed I didn't know about after removing them with apt. I had to fully search with dpkg to find them. They ended up being the root cause of a seemingly unrelated issue I was having trying to run a game through steam. So yeah make sure to fully purge the Nvidia drivers.

In addition there are also often packages to get hardware acceleration of video working, if you care about saving energy / fan noise there.

Seems weird to replace a 3080 but hey, whatever floats your goat.

I switched from Nvidia to AMD recently. As long as you have a recent kernel you should be fine. If you're running an old/stable distro you might have issues with mesa, especially if you need OpenCL or ROCm. For general use and gaming it worked for me with no fuss.

There isn't anything you need to know. It's the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it's like, a job or hobby or something.

I think the only thing to keep in mind is that Nvidias proprietary drivers work better for Linux whereas for AMD it is the open-source ones.

I have an Nvidia card and the prop. drivers have worked flawlessly for me for years.

I know the open source drivers are closing the gap for Nvidia, and they also seem to be playing ball on that front. But for AMD the open source drivers are definitely the way to go from what I understand.

If no one minds my hyjacking part of this thread.

Id also like some similar advice.

I use blender. Not heavily but have been playing on it for 20plus years.

My GPU is pretty old. 1050ti at the time nvidia was pretty much it for blender.

Im looking for a sub £300 card in the next 3 to 6 months.

Is AMD well supported by blender now. And what cards would folks recomend these days.

PS not a gamer. 0ad is about as close as i get.

Short answer is that you don't have to do anything.

Slightly longer answer is that you can remove all existing nvidia packages, with any boot parameters they may have required, call it a day.

I've never done the process myself, but I would probably uninstall the nvidia drivers while the system is still running, install whatever amd packages you need I know there are some vulkan packages that people need that aren't installed by default, and then power off and swap the cards.