Proprietary Drivers vs Open Source | nVidia vs AMD 

Correction: you can add a non-free repository to your package manager to automatically update your proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

The AMD open source graphics were very easy to get set up. I’m glad I decided to get a Vega 56 for Linux gaming.

THE BEARD IS GONE! :D -- Thanks for this video Chris. I had that question in mind about the video cards. Awesome information.

Yet another reason I love running Manjaro these days. Update Manager (PAMAC) updates my Nvidia Drivers automatically. Thanks to the Manjaro Team for keeping most of their software and hardware drivers updated 100% of the time.

On Arch or Manjaro, with an nVidia card, you install the package. Simple as that. You don't have to go on their website. Except you might have to use Compton as a compositor with XFCE to avoid screen tearing, which is pretty dumb, but works. I don't like their proprietary driver, but the truth is, it fits the needs of most people. My advice is : choose a product, not a brand.

On Linux Mint and Ubuntu, you simply copy/paste PPA and install drivers, all in GUI, no terminal needed. Software Sources and Driver Manager in Linux Mint, Software & Updates > Other Software and Additional Drivers tabs in Ubuntu. Same with Manjaro in Manjaro Settings Manager > Hardware Configuration. You don't need to download the Nvidia .run file from their website.

I’ve tried Linux a few times over the years and where it ALWAYS fell down for me was crappy graphics drivers. So this is good news for me, and I am using AMD graphics 😊.

In addition to the non-free repository you can add to your package manager in most distros so you get the proprietary NVIDA drivers, Manjaro asks you when you install it if you want the proprietary drivers, and then keeps them up to day, they're in the official repos on Arch, and Ubuntu 19.10 will also include the proprietary drivers on the ISO... so it's going to be pretty equal standing again in no time as far getting them working.

Thnx for this video to collect ideas for my new setup :). Now i am in love with my Radeon 7 (water cooled) with the opensource driver!

I'm glad you brought up Mesa, Because that is how the AMD driver updates in the kernel.. You had me worried for a second. LOL. This is where I suggest Ubuntu and POP OS etc POP OS installs the NVIDIA driver for you and adds the NVIDIA nonfree repository for you and the other ISO adds MESA for the AMD/Intel GPUs (Vanilla Ubuntu you have to add the ppa yourself) Also MESA requires the Vulkan runtime libraries too. I know I made that mistake the first time trying to run DXVK, I had some really weird shit happen

I recommend Radeon-Profile from GIT ( maramista or Marazamista). Fantastic tool to manage your Radeon GPU. Custom fun curve ( 0% rpm work), OC can be done, Undervolting not yet implemented, full info about your card, graphic GPU usage real-time, power states manage, no root required, has emergency GPU manage, daemon in background! Very recommend it!

This actually cleared up something for my laptop. It is an Intel/ Nvidia... Thanks!

Manjaro let you choose during install to use proprietary drivers for Nvidia. And keeps it up to date. Opensuse you add the Nvidia repo, and you install the driver once, and Tumbleweed keeps it up to date. And I am sure that other distro' s have similar solutions. Don't download drivers from the web, al lot of distro' s have a very simple solution if you want to use proprietary drivers.

Will the mesa drivers automatically update themselves to the latest version or i have to update the kernel ?

I am trying to Install Adrenaline 2020 Raedon software on PopOS. Do you have an links or tutorials I can follow? Much appreciated

Amdgpu-pro is just extension for Amdgpu open source driver. Fglrx sucked, not amdgpu-pro.

Thank you for that! Before installing the newest Nvidia drivers, is there a nice easy way to remove all pre-existing drivers? Thank you in advance!

Much needed video! Everyone seems to have issues with graphics drivers in Linux. Sometimes when installing fresh Linux on a laptop it freezes on start up because of ACPI and we need to add "acpi_osi=!" "acpi_osi='Windows 2009'". Can you tell why does this happens? Does it have to do something with Graphics and Nvidia Optimus?

Chris, for NVidia on at least Fedora, using a run file to install a driver is an option, yes, but users have only had to do that when the standard repos had not yet packaged the very latest NVidia driver. I have been using NVidia since 2001, and I've always installed drivers via a repository. Only a few times did I use the NVidia run installer for special cases. Although I replaced the NVidia card in my desktop with an AMD Radeon RX 590, I still have a laptop with NVidia. I run Nouveau on that, because the proprietary driver for that card became legacy before NVidia updated their driver architecture to make integration with the Linux kernel more seamless. Consequently, one day when I upgraded my kernel, the new Linux GPU driver architecture arrived, but it didn't support my card, and Fedora couldn't upgrade my driver and my current driver needed to be rebuilt, but I couldn't enter graphical mode, and couldn't determine how to fix it easily, so I reinstalled Fedora and left it to use the default Nouvea, which is fine, because I don't run games on it anymore. Regardless, there's no need to use a run file to install NVidia drivers. There rarely has EVER been a reason for it.

Excellent video. I am putting some older systems on Linux and found the driver situation a bit confusing. Seems to be more like how things work on Mac where everything is all installed by default without hunting drivers as much.

Thanks for the info, please make an updated video with Intel as well

Have been running Linux on my laptop for some time now but have had the same big problem for ages until my recent install of PoP os. The problem I had was using switchable graphics, betreen the onboard intel and discrete amd 7970 graphics card. I could never get the amd card to work properly with many of the distros I tried they all defaulted to the onboard intel. With later releases of ubuntu I read that older cards may not be supported with drivers and kind of gave up on it for a while. Pop has changed things so much for the better and I was wondering if other distros were starting to do the same or whether there were tutorials to help get the same switchable graphics solution as found in pop.

I just bought a Sapphire Pulse 5600XT. It works out of the box with open source drivers. Unfortunately there is no control panel/app like the proprietary app in Windows. There is no easy way to control the GPU's hardware features.

What about older graphics cards? What if you just want decent RU-vid playback at up to 1080p? I'm dealing with an old system a friend has with a Radeon RS690 chipset. I could install the proprietary driver if it would help video playing.

Thank god for your videosss!!! New Manjaro user. So confused on drivers for my Vega 10...and figuring out what I needed. So just enable open-source install. I don't need xf86-video-amdgpu / mhwd-amdgpu / amd ucode? I think i blindly installed these once I got my system up and running. Also do I need to enable installation on Mesa? Apologize to bombard with questions. Definitely love your content! If i can support your content/work out of appreciation, let me know!

The resolution is fine on my debian 10 but the boot software (before KDE loads and by the way is KDE necessary? I found that it slows down boot time), anyway before KDE starts the resolution AND the screen aligment are out of order totally, small resolution and the screen is actually off set! any ideas?

Hey Chris, I don't see Purism Librem One service link in the description? Is it launched? I was waiting for it to launch from so long..

hey my ubuntu gnome 20.04 is very slow..i would like to upgrade my drivers to nvidia or amd because right now it is ASPEED or LLVM im not sure but its one of the two...any help will be helpful thanks

I am trying for a week to make 2 nvidia gpu with 2 displays but it doesnt work with none last drivers on three different linux. The only way see both disolays working at once is x.org drivers but lag in performance. Am I right?

So surprised to hear you recommend the RX 580. I'm watching these videos because I'm on the edge of giving up on my rx580 and dumping it on ebay second hand. I have tried the kernel driver, the Asus driver, the AMDGPU probably not installed correctly and the computer has never booted reliably. I have wandered if Mint20 is a problem because all the reading I find is using older distro's.

The issue I have is 'unable to connect to x server: Connection refused' although lspci -nnk shows that my and drivers are loaded.?

Do you have any idea about installing AMDVLK on fedora 31 ?

when i run he .run in the terminal is it suposed to do anything for me. it just enters back into the terminal

Mesa or vesa for r5 3400g? I want to try gaming and all guides say i should install mesa but what config Manjaro shows vesa as option

@Chris, would it be possible to make a video over how to enable freesync in linux with the open source drivers.. Really dont know how to do this. Only knows how it works in windows.

WILL the AMV Drivers work well with Davinci Resolve 16?

I am running a AMD 2500u laptop with integrated Vega 8 graphics I've installed "amdgpu" drivers, but I'm facing some performance issues on video playback on RU-vid. CPU usage jumps up to 60-70%. It never happened in windows, looks like it isn't using hardware acceleration for decoding videos. I don't play games, so haven't checked out gaming performance. Should I switch to AMD GPU Pro?

Hi. Thanks for sharing. If I'm buying an AMD card for an older computer. How will i know if it is the amd pro version or the one that works well with linux. I've always used nvidia cards on my linux machine.

Ok, but what about Navi cards and open-source drivers now? I've heard people stuck on a lot of problems with 5700 and 5700XT running them on linux.

I'm still fairly new to Linux but have an ok grasp on it I would say. I know how to use the terminal and have installed the mesa drivers but I was wondering I'm on Linux mint 20.3 with the KDE desktop environment intel core i3 10100 AMD radeon RX 6600 XT is there a GUI settings menu for AMD GPUs on Linux? Most games work just fine for me but for example I'm playing stray with occasional dips in frame rate which is manageable but obviously not having dips in FPS is best. Meanwhile games like NFS heat are playable but I get terrible FPS (sometimes below 20) I was wondering if maybe I can mess with some of the GPU settings or if I'm just gonna have to deal with some games just not being as playable as I want them to be. I still dualboot with windows 10 so it's not a big issue since these games run great on windows.

Great video. I'm using Linux Arch full time and it's on an Asus R2 Sabertooth FX900 motherboard with a FX8350 CPU, Nvidia 660 GPU and 32 gigabytes of RAM. It's fast as anything, BUT I am doing a lot of Blender now and of course that is killing the 660. I've been looking at a new GPU, I don't want a new system. The FX8350 is great with Linux. It's reliable and I've never had any problems with the system when I was running Win10. I've been looking at the AMD RX5700 but I could run into bottlenecks as the system is pretty old with such an advanced GPU. AMD on their listing does say the RX is compatible with the Sabertooth. So, I am thinking of getting 2 RX590s. That would give me 16GB of VRAM for Blender and the SabertoothFX900 with the FX8350 should be able to handle those. Having 2 GPUS, will my Arch running 5.4.10 kernel automatically detect the GPU's and give me a running system? Updating Nvidia 660 has been a pain, so once I got my three monitors working, I disabled any Nvidia updates. Great info on the GPU front. Glad you have a stable system.

Hello Sir, I have an AMD graphics card that is causing me problems, and since it's attached to the motherboard disabling the driver is the only way to fix the problem, so how can I do that on Linux, I've been doing it on windows easily but I'm planning to switch to Linux and I don't know how to do that on there

For Ubuntu (probably Mint too), I suggest "you Go to Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers", once yours drivers are installed, reboot. This can be called on command prompt with "sudo ubuntu-drivers devices". Taken from help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto and help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia This will let you choose which version of the Nvidia drivers you need to install for your older cards (as older cards are not supported anymore by latest version). This will also ensure to update the graphic driver when a new kernel is upgraded by the package manager.

I’ve been an AMD user with Linux for a while now. I’ve always run into the problem of booting into a blank screen after installing nvidia drivers. Never had that problem with my 5700 XT or Vega 64.

On Ubuntu you can open Software & Updates and then go to the Other Software tab and add ppa:graphics-drivers If you do that you get more updated open source drivers for Nvidia cards in the Additional Drivers tab. /Not an Arch user

I installed my graphics card and it's using driver "radeon" but I can tell by the frame rate in games it's not being utilized. What do I do?

Its possible to use Crossfire? I have two old graphics that in windows i can use both to get 4 gb DDR5 video memory but in linux i only can use one card so i only can use 2 gb... and some games require a lot of ram.

The official manual of Nvidia for Ubuntu actually says you have to quit your graphical interface and then run the driver installation from the terminal interface, which indeed was a must for me on Linux Mint. This made it really a pain for me to update the Nvidia graphics driver. Now I simply switched to AMD.

I am thinking in buy a AMD Radeon 5600XT for multimonitor desktop linux (2xFullHD and 1x4K) and just to use hardware acceleration in Firefox and Chrome. Is it usefull for this matter? I have a regular laptop and is not enought for so many monitors. Thanks.

Ok, I went AMD exactly due to this: moving from WinOS to LinuxOS, I moved from Intel/NVidia to AMD/ATI too. Point is: I'm running on a "new" Acer Aspire 3 A315-41-R1HG with an AMD Radeon Vega Mobile Graphics 8, and seems that no drivers are issued for this kind of videocard - at least, not on Mint v18.3 XFCE; which seems the only OS supported (v17.3 has an issue with a grub that is "too old"; while v19.1 goes into CPU stuck for 23 seconds and never installs). Are these drivers a separate package I need to find and install or there's some other trick needed to get AMD's laptop graphic card to work?

do I need lib32 packages and catalyst drivers?

One thing I hope to get better is Blender playing nice with AMD open source driver, and its low performance with OpenCL. I really don't want to install proprietary driver just to see if it's better (but it seems to lock compatibility with 18.04 anyway). Everything else is great for me.

I just bought RX 580 8GB for $62 on used market and I'm really happy with the performance so far, I played older titles like Metro series, Half life 2, BioShock, and etc which still runs smoothly even on 4K for some games, the best thing is I don't need to install any driver whatsoever, it's just works 😁

Would have also been nice to hear about the `dkms` solution for nvidia, since that has made driver installation and updates much easier. Good info other than that for new people. I run an AMD card because `amdgpu` is pretty good, but the girlfriend runs a 2070S, so she's using the `nvidia-dkms` package to install (and keep up-to-date) her nvidia drivers automatically. Most package managers that have dkms packages support automatically running dkms on kernel upgrade so that the drivers rebuild.

helo Sir. how to install nvidia geforce GT 755M on lenovo ideapad y410P using fedora design 36? It has 2 vga.. internal VGA (intel HD) & nvidia geforce GT 755M. I've tried many ways but it always failed

Chris, your invite code for Discord has apparently expired, it doesn't let me join. PS: You're an awesome guy running an awesome channel doing awesome things, keep it up! EDIT: It works now, apparently my Internet cut out just after I clicked the link, meaning it gave a "code expired" message rather than a "no connection" message.

Is overclocking the graphics card as easy on Linux as it is on Windows (MSI Afterburner)? If not how can I go about it?

I remember with amdgpu when it was new, it wasn't compatible yet with my Carrizo APU, and it did run with my RX 480, but steam wouldn't start with it out of the box. I had to use the amdpru-pro driver to get steam to run.

I have a Amd Vega 8 + Rx560x setup in my laptop.. in windows i can just switch them whenever i want.. is that possible in linux too?? I really want to go all in into linux, no dual boot. That is the only thing that's stopping me

Do to pentesting not gaming, on Manjaro and then Arch, what's the best ? thx

Great content like always! I am running a Ryzen 5 2600 systen with 16gb of Ram and a Sapphire Radeon Rx570 4gb , runs flawlessly! I am using PopOs since 3 months, pretty nice distro.

I got a optiplex 5040 SFF and ordered a radeon r5 2GB card that will fit that should be coming today. This answers my question as I know very little about the hardware end and will be getting a vanilla Arch install. This is on top of my SSD for root/grub and HDD for swap/home/var setup. Not as scary as I thought it would be.

I've been using nvidia for 15+ years simply because getting Radeon drivers to work was such a pain. I had no idea AMD open sourced their drivers and linux fixed this. Glad I stumbled on this video. Grabbing nvidia drivers from the repo has *mostly* worked well enough for me - with a few hiccups here and there (usually as a result of compiling my own kernel). I'm upgrading my pc now after a few years and this video saved me a few bucks. Thanks!

Amd graphics driver already included in linux kernel?? Then why my ryzen 3700u won't work with debian 10?

I got an issue with xorg freezing under "heavy" load and the x server needs to be restarted. I have a geforce 210 and the driver is nvidia 340, but no matter what it seems like it's not fixable. I am quite certain that it's just simply a driver problem.

Installed pop os as i had anough of windows 10,had no problem with my nvidia gtx750 ti pop store as far as i now keeps me updated.

I have an amd gpu in my laptop but ubuntu uses integrated intel gpu. How can I change it

There needs to be a dedicated video on switchable graphics in linux. I use PopOs because regular ubuntu doesn't do switchable properly. Laptops are a thing, you know?

My Arco B install does not have the Nvidia 340.xx legacy drivers for my old Thinkpad W530, QuadroK1000m graphics card.

Hi. I've got a new pc the latest amd card and installed linux mint. Before, I always had nvidia on LM without problems (>10y). Took some time to figure out why my graphics card was not installed/detected. First thing: I had to switch to a much newer kernel than the one that LM came with. Then, it still wasn't perfect, but it got a lot better after installing the amd prop drivers (included turning of my pc, shut off the power and push the power-on button for 30 secs and restarting; after that everything went fine). Still miss the nvidia gui program to tweak it, but radeontop now shows it's running/working and everything seems okaynow. My point : amd still seems to be for Linux/computer geeks if you buy some of their latest (most expensive) products.

On my 9 year old laptop with on-board Intel GPU.... With Kernel 4.19 and older, the best playback I could get was 720p (1080p was choppy). Now with Kernel 5.x, I get smooth 1080p playback.

I have run NVidia official repo for Tumbleweed and it have worked fine for long now. Allwasy uppdate when the rest is uppdating. Autorecompile the driver when a new kernel is out.

NVIDIA Linux drivers are high quality. If you can get past the ideological hurdle of them not being open source, the technical hurdles aren't great. Distros package them in an easy to install manner, even Debian. Distributions tend to recommend against getting the binaries direct from NVIDIA (the .run file) because it makes it harder to upgrade them, can make kernel upgrades harder, you can run into conflicts, etc. You're doing it on hard mode if you do it that way. Honestly, apart from not being open source NVIDIA Linux drivers have been great and just work.

Actually Nvidia also released open-source drivers from version 430.x . I use opensuse tumbleweed and archlinux and both were available for me from default package manager. For archlinux or fedora you need to install .run file for first time driver installation for ubuntu or debian you can use ppa and for opensuse you can use yast2 and add nvidia community repo to install drivers

I had a lot of headaches with nvidia, steam and 32bit libraries on my recent build.

what about open cl do i need amd pro driver for it

It is kinda strange, that AMD is more open for open source and Linux, but many Linux guys still using nVidia GPUs. Also, it is also strange, that AMD themselves have not yet created Adrenaline (and other utilities) to control the GPU. Thankfully we have community ^^ Thanks for the video, Chris!

I am ditching Intel and nvidia for my next pc. Will the Navi rx 5700 work out of the box now? my only requirement is opengl 4.5

i would find out what the difference between mesa and vulkan

I came upon the idea of installing from non-free firmware ISOs. So it seems that this might solve proprietary driver woes. Can anyone confirm this?

I have got a question. I have an AMD R9 390 and I have had terror experiences trying to get it up on Linux (Haven't tried recently). What Kernel should I be running and up?

Amd rx4808gb won't be able to run with Davinci Resolve, gpu pro needed, but amdgpu is unsupported. WTF

Why you succumbed to pressure and shaved? Facial hair was so badass💪

Love the video! I'm doing a Linux PC-build soon and I will be picking up an AMD RX580. I'd love to go fully AMD with a Ryzen CPU as well, but I'm not sure if I need to have the bleeding edge kernel to run it well (Ryzen 2600).

o.O Hey do you know how to make my Nvidia X Server Settings in POP!_OS 19.04 permanent... I keep losing my choices after reboot -_-

I still wondering can we do some graphics card overclocking in linux? because we can do some graphics card overclocking in windows (like using msi afterburner).

Chris can you make a video on krita 4.2 and your views on it?

Switch from a GTX980 to a Radeon RX5700 XT on Linux Mint 19.3 and the drivers are not installing. Cant use it at all. Is there a how to somewhere? Even installed Linux new. Nothing. Help!

It is a headache to configure the nvidia drivers in Linux, first you lose the image or the scaling or you lose the audio or you just do not start the installation of the distribution. Today I'm still struggling to have audio through HDMI in Ubuntu 19.04 with 418 drives.

Will you make an updated video on how to get Nvidia drivers fro new Linux users

I currently have all nvidia cards…but it seems lately the nvidia drivers have some weird issues creeping up like the desktop corruption coming out of suspend or compositing performance issues (while everything else including gaming is fine). This is the first time in over a decade I have had deal breaking issues out of the box that require more time to research and fix than I’d prefer to put into it. I’m older now with less time on my hands and there is a reason I don’t use Debian or Slackware anymore and use things like kubuntu or mint. I do like the nvidia control panel that comes with their proprietary driver, does amds open source driver have anything comparable? It’s not a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice. My card is getting older and I was considering upgrading and thinking about giving AMD a try for the first time since my old ATi 9700 pro if or when the gpu price bubble pops.

A freesync kinux video would be interesting

The games mostly runs like a charm on Nvidia Linux combo. But what about the 3d stereoscopic gaming on Linux. Any experience?

I'm happy that I've decided to drop my GTX 1050Ti and replace it with a RX 6600. Basically, it was a matter of drivers that led me to do this. Simply, by upgrading from Kubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS, my GPU stopped working properly with the official drivers. However, after changing to AMD, the drivers weren't there, and after installing them my computer was constantly freezing and crashing. After installing Kununtu from scratch, my new GPU never failed on me again. I'm glad I've decided to wait before RMA a card that would be good.

i want to play games but also i want to do video editing. using da vinci resolve, openshot, shotcut, kdenlive,, etc. So you suggest again amd graphics card or nvidia for linux?

If you use a distro like Fedora or Arch where they always use the latest stable kernel. Use AMD. If you have to use Nvidia then use Ubuntu or a derivative.

The only thing with using AMD in Linux is you don't get the GPU video encoding in Handbrake. Nvidia on the other hand is easy to setup GPU video encoding for Handbrake.

Please my Linux brothers, i need your help. I want to switch so bad on Manjaro, but the problem is, when i play a video on youtube in 4k, video is smooth but when i play it on Manjaro on 4k, video start to stutter. Does anyone knows how can i fix that so i can move finally to Manjaro? Sudo apt plshelpme (i have laptop with integrated Intel UHD 620 and dedicated AMD Radeon 530)

i'm using popo's 76 how do i ENABLE COOL BITS

Not exactly you can use the Gnome software app. The only thing is that you need to sign the driver if you are using secure boot