Boycott Nvidia, their new cards are just overpriced hardware keys to fixing their software.

It’s much better these days - at least it works fine on arch and fedora. I wouldn’t worry about nvidia on Linux. That said, I’d go AMD for another reason - $. There’s just no reason to spend the kind of money nvidia wants when you can get something just a tad slower for 1/4 the price. AMD makes cards that can drive a huge monitor at high fps.

Bottom line: whatever is fine.

I just did a new build with AMD 9800X3D and RTX 5080. I’ve been dual booting Win 11 and Nobara. I haven’t done direct head to head benchmarks but Deep Rock Galactic, Deep Rock Survivor, Satisfactory, Skyrim, Atomic Heart all have run fine on Nobara.

The big difference I’ve noticed is Cyberpunk 2077. For whatever reason the AI frame generation tool doesn’t seem to work on Nobara so max FPS is around 65-70 with max raytracing/graphics settings. On Windows I got around 75+ and with the AI frame generation it goes up to 180 (I realize this is not a feature that some people like, please just realize I’m reporting my testing results).

Now all of that said, there is this weird jitteriness along the edges of objects with rapid camera movement in Cyberpunk on Windows, even at 180 fps, that isn’t there on Nobara. So even though the objective frame rate is much lower on Nobara, it actually feels much smoother and nicer.

¯\(ツ)/¯

I’ve been running Fedora for over a year now with an Nvidia 3090 RTX with no major problems. I can think of one game (Path of Exile 2) where I needed to make a minor configuration tweak to get it working.

I just stick to AMD, especially on Linux. The official AMD driver is open source on Linux, included in mainline kernel, and performance is better than their Windows diver now

I’m using endeavourOS with Nvidia 4090 with proprietary drivers and it works fine for most games without tinkering. For issues with Linux gaming you can check protonDB. Steam, lutris and heroic game launchers are doing wonders for a big portion of the gaming options on Linux. I wouldn’t change the 3080 with AMD if I were you.

Don’t buy nvidia. Intel and AMD opensourced their drivers and, more importantly, care for their customer needs. And i am talking about gaming customers.

The only thing nvidia cares about is AI and lots of money.

They lie to their customers (fake frames, paperlaunch) und neglect the gaming needs in favor of AI.

And, after all, AMD does not use 12V high power connectors, just simple, non burning, dual 8 pins

I daily drive Linux, gaming quite a bit and I have a 3080.

There are occasional annoyances, for example when I wake from suspend one of my monitors doesn’t activate until I change display settings (which I do now with a script bound to a hotkey, though a fix is in the pipe). Most of the time it doesn’t cause me any issues.

I’ve kept a Windows install on a partition as a backup in case I have real compatibility issues but I haven’t booted it in weeks (even then, it was to play an anti cheat game, nothing NVIDIA related).

I use Hyprland (on Arch, btw) so I’m technically using unsupported software but I have had no major issues.

On the plus side, I can run local AI easily and DLSS/DLAA, to me, produce higher quality results and with less overhead. Ray tracing is technically in the plus column but most of the time I’d rather just have higher FPS than the visual quality.

I don’t have HDR gaming just yet (my biggest complaint) because gamescope likes to crash, assuming it launches in the first place. However, a Wayland update is going to fix this imminently (next major release) so you can get HDR without gamescope.

Basically, there were trying times in the past but currently (assuming you’re using current versions of things and not some LTS release from a year ago) it’s largely a smooth experience.

A couple years ago I swore off Nvidia on principle. For periods things would seem fine but updates would randomly break games and other things. Sold that card and got an amd haven’t seen that issue since.

I haven’t done any research into GPUs on Linux in awhile. I wasn’t aware nvidia finally released an open source driver. Looks like it’s recommended for the 3080. Seems like this was a fairly recent development so you may have more luck?

I’ve been doing almost all of my gaming on Linux for 2 years now, running a 5800X3D and an RTX 3080.

Why the “almost”? I love to fly flight simulators, mostly DCS World, in VR and am still using an HP Reverb G2 (Windows) headset.

Everything else works without issues on Linux for me. I’ve been sitting on Pop!_OS 22.04 but if I were to install today, I’d go for Linux Mint

AMD is ideal but Nvidia is fine. Basically any game that would work on AMD will work on Nvidia (only exception I know of is the VR mode of Phasmophobia edit: apparently this was fixed ~1yr ago). Gamepass still won’t work though - blame Microsoft for that one.

That said, Nvidia has more of a performance hit when switching. Ancient Gameplays recently did a video comparing Nobara vs Windows 11, with both the RX 7900XTX and the RTX 4080 Super. These were his average results across 20 games:

RX 7900XTX: 1080p +2%, 1440p +0%, 4k -2.2%

RTX 4080S: 1080p -13.8%, 1440p -13%, 4k -10.2%

So your games will work. They just might run 10%-15% slower until you can snag an AMD card. If you’re interested in fully committing, looks like most used 3080s are going for ~$500 on ebay, so you could probably get an AMD card and get most of your money back.

I’m using Garuda with Nvidia and it’s been painless. I do feel like a get a little less performance, but it’s been good enough to keep me happy.

Try Linux Mint or CachyOS, most will work out of the box also Nvidia graphics cards.

I have a 7900 XTX. It just works™.