if you use the proprietary drivers you’ll be fine, probably not even noticable

if you go with a Radeon card or try using open source drivers then go with god

I’ve been gaming on Linux with nvidia gpus for over a decade, it is fine… There is a lot of negativity about nvidia because the drivers are not open. But they work, and I have not personally had any issues.

I’ve been gaming on Nvidia cards since I switched over 3 years ago and only had a few issues.

On initial install, the opensource nvidia drivers wouldn’t work - I had to go into the terminal and select the proprietary ones. That’s pretty much it, really. Other than that, I’ve had about the same amount of issues with AMD(integrated graphics) and Nvidia.

On the plus side, Nvidia has a nice little control panel. It’s basic, doesn’t have all that GeForce Experience stuff, plus there are command line utilities like nvidia-smi(basic info) and nvtop(temp, clock, usage, memory stats). AMD doesn’t have a control panel, that I’m aware of.

As far as distro, I’d say just chose the one you’re most comfortable with. I don’t think there are any huge differences between them concerning gaming performance.

@pleasemakesense > Are my fears unfounded/outdated?

They are mostly outdated. Nvidia works just as fine as amd does

As long as you can get the driver installed, you’re fine. The only time that might be a problem is if your distro updates something that breaks compatibility with the existing driver, and X refuses to start. You’ll need to know how to install the latest driver from the command line, but then you should be good.

I’ve been running a 3080 with proprietary drivers on manjaro for a couple of years (I would not recommend manjaro, I now recommend endeavorOS if you want something Arch based) and it’s fine. I don’t think I’ve ever hit an nvidia specific bug.

I’ve just switched from a GTX 1080 to a Radeon RX 6650 because of problems I was having with the Nvidia binary drivers.

Games performed just fine, but my desktop performance would slow down dramatically if I had a lot of things running at the same time, especially YouTube videos. This issue seems completely resolved now that I’m using an AMD card.

However, based on what I’m reading online it seems that a lot of people are using the Nvidia binary drivers without any major issues. So maybe my experience isn’t very representative either.

I’ve been using Linux Mint with an Nvidia GPU for a few months now. I have run into a few issues where it hasn’t wanted to behave itself, buf nothing major or unsolvable.

I have 3060 Ti and have had no trouble. I even used it with Arch and Gentoo, and all I needed was installing the drivers (the package manager did it) and it worked out of the box.

It’s not great I can’t even use nvenc and have to use software encoding for OBS…

I mean everything else works, so I guess this is a high bar? ?

Running KDE Neon here, my Nvidia experience has been faultless, adding the PPA and installing the drivers is reliable and straightforward. Wayland works acceptably, but running a single 4k 27" monitor X11 works perfectly, so at this point in time I see no reason to swap to Wayland - I’m sure in time I’ll adopt Wayland, I’m simply not quite ready to drop my ability to create custom fan profiles using GWE just yet.

Nvidia X Server settings are nice, as is nvidia-smi.

I use Fedora 37 workstation with the Nvidia proprietary drivers from RPM Fusion. Relatively painless install, with the option to sign the kernel module if you want to keep secure boot on. Only downside is the Nvidia drivers still don’t work great with Wayland, so I normally login with Gnome on X for gaming.

I use GTX 1660 Ti and I had some problems, but nothing of impossible to solve. I use Arch with zen kernel and nvidia-dkms with XFCE as DE. List of games that I play: Apex Legends, Hogwarts Legacy, Grime, Ironsight, Albion Online, Nostale with Steam. League of Legends with Lutris. Vampyr, Bioshock Remastered 1 and 2 with Heroic Game Launcher.