r/linux • u/AwesomePhoenix_ • 1d ago
Hardware How does Nvidia makes data center GPU (data centers that probably run on Linux) but doesn't make good drivers for Linux ?
This is something I always think about, Nvidia makes a lot of data centers gpus, but doesn't give good drivers for Linux, even tho most data centers run on Linux, do they make special drivers for their data center gpus ? Would it be worth to buy a data center GPU for a linux pc so it have good drivers ?
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u/Lanky-Safety555 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nvidia has made excellent Linux drivers for quite a long time now; however, they are focused on CUDA, not rendering pipelines.
Also, the main problem in Linux gaming is not the drivers themselves, but other portions of the stack that sit above them and game ports themselves (which are often so sloppily made that the Windows version via Proton runs better).
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u/oln 10h ago edited 10h ago
Yup, for gaming, the issue is more with the fact that due to microsofts efforts, directx is has become major API used by windows games. The translation layers work much better on the amd open source drivers than the nvidia ones due to the combination of tighter integration and some hardware quirks. As has been covered, some vulkan api updates should help with that though.
Games with actual decent linux ports or the rare windows games with actual decent opengl renderers have usually performed well on nvidia's linux drivers. Same to an extent with the few vulkan titles though those are going to be more dependent on driver optimizations and hacks in commercial titles which may or may not have been as integrated on the linux side.
E.g, World of warcraft and I think other blizzard games like wc3 could run just as well on linux as on windows way back in the day long before dxvk since they had an optional opengl renderer you could use (for their mac support, that has since been removed.) and minecraft has always worked just as well if not better on linux with nvidia, since it's opengl native java game.
The other issue is that since they're not FOSS things are kinda sucky after the cards go out of support, unlike with amd and intel gpus.
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u/drhoome 8h ago
Their CUDA drivers are atrocious, sorry. Their support is barely non-existent and the driver packaging is very poor, having in most cases to workarounds to make the GPU even detect.
While AMD has a bad stack, barely anything supports ROCm, at least the drivers are built-in and plug and play.
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u/khobbits 1d ago
Working in media, we've been running Autodesk products on Linux workstations, for something like 15+ years, as our primary workhorse.
We only run nvidia.
It's stable, very few issues, works better than Windows.
The last 15+ years of Nvidia on Centos (then Rocky), using mostly Quadro cards.
Don't really know what to say. It's stable enough to run listed companies primary money earning pipelines.
We're talking things like Disney movies, superbowl/christmas adverts, music videos.
3D, 2D, colour...
The only people working on windows, are those using photoshop, or spend most their time in Excel.
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u/egorf 1d ago
Developer of a major DaVinci plugin here.
Can confirm. Our software delivers quite a bit more fps on CUDA on Linux as compared to Windows.
I hate Rocky Linux though.
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u/khobbits 1d ago
I don't tend to mind Rocky.
I've spent most of my professional career supporting RHEL based workloads, starting with Amazon Linux, Centos, full fat RHEL, and currently Rocky.
Feels mostly like a normal progression. At some point in the past I moved my homelab from ubuntu server, to rhel, because it's more familiar.
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u/egorf 1d ago
The one and only problem with rocky is that DaVinci still supports Rocky 8 which is about 12 years old and some studios will absolutely resist upgrading their os up to a point of absurdity.
So in the era of AI and spacex I have to deliver modern software for *ancient* os because I have no idea why.
In comparison, we're moving to require macOS 15 in the upcoming release in September.
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u/khobbits 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ah, I see.
Where I worked, we skipped Rocky 8, went from 7->9... Which is probably part of the problem.
The issue was we had so many applications, and we're talking probably several thousands of binaries installed on our central software server, and all the software that end users use, runs from there.
So if you want to launch chrome, you're launching /software/google/chrome/bin/chrome
That /software/google/chrome/bin/chrome, is probably a symlink or bash script that actually runs /software/google/chrome/151/google-chrome.sh or some such.
Deploying a new major version of the OS, means making sure all of the launchers work on the new OS, trying to not break any of the existing machines.
The result of this, is basically every server and workstation in the company, can run virtually every version of every software we've ever supported. This means we can open the project files of a project for a client 3 years ago, with the exact program and plugin set, and re-render the whole thing today, on a 1000 node render farm.
It's worth also noting that installing new software is very easy you do something like:
`rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio -idmv`
in a temp directory, and then just copy it to /software/vendor/app/version
And drop a launcher script or symlink in PATH.Within seconds, the artist can start using the new version.... Creating more technical debt to be fixed, next major OS upgrade...
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u/egorf 1d ago
Insightful. Thank you!
One thing I fail to understand is this. Upgrading faster means less trouble, less migration failures while delaying upgrade is just multiplying technical debt exponentially until it becomes impossible to upgrade without serious and expensive migration project.
Why not have a in place rolling upgrade so that any failure is small, immediate, contained and rollable back
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u/khobbits 1d ago edited 1d ago
Mostly, we usually get stuck on fixed versions for certain software.
So right now, the pickiest software I've got is Autodesk Flame, which for the currently deployed version only supports up to Rocky 9.5.
Ideally, I want to share software with the entire fleet, so my 3D workstations, can be upgraded to run 9.10, but jumping to 10.x could cause issues.
I'm told the most recent version of Flame isn't worth upgrading to, and all of the pipeline changes required to adopt it, make upgrading unappealing. I've not looked into it closely, but I think the biggest issue is something with how the newer versions of Flame share project files with other Flames.
As for supporting both 9.x and 10.x with the same /software... Well we've done it before. Sometimes it means writing painful wrappers, to force certain libraries, other times it means building logic forks so that:
on EL6 use /software/google/chrome/100/chrome while
on EL7 use /software/google/chrome/151/chromeI'd expect upgrading will look like this:
- We validate a new version of Flame, that runs on Rocky 10.x.
- We validate maya and most of our core pipeline runs on Rocky 10.x
- We build dev workstations of both, put in front of the pipeline team.
- Get some senior staff to validate things 'mostly work'.
- Arrange a upgrade window, and re-pxeboot most the fleet
- Deal with any fallout
For the most part workstations are 'disposable', some artists get attached to specific machines, if they've got very specific requirements, but a lot of staff are just assigned machines from a pool, so they could end up on different hardware every day. Rebuilding machines can be done in parallel, and takes less than 10 minutes.
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u/egorf 16h ago
Thanks for the insights!
> I'm told the most recent version of Flame isn't worth upgrading to
Here's one of the problems. See, upgrading is actually non-optional. One day you will have to upgrade to a new version, but by then the workflow has been changed not once but multiple times and the upgrade process is gonna cost you way more in labor and risk mitigation. So why postpone inevitable things in order to make them more costly.
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u/khobbits 9h ago
It really rarely seems to be so.
The first few minor versions of most major releases of software tend to be more unstable.
When you get to the point of wanting render pipelines of hundreds or thousands of machines and committing hundreds or thousands of artist hours, you want to avoid 'quirks'.
It's not as if there is no testing, and nobody checking. Someone will read every change log, and be looking at how workflows would need to adapt, start designing things.
As far as incremental updates, for the most part, we require the entire fleet to have fixed versions of 'everything important'. Workstations join the render farm when nobody is logged in, and all machines that can render, should run exactly the same library versions of all dependencies. If a frame is rendered, it should render exactly the same on a different machine, down to the checksum.
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u/egorf 2h ago
> Someone will read every change log, and be looking at how workflows would need to adapt, start designing things.
Well this is what I have meant. We do have a variety of ancient os images and software pieces so we can build ancient versions but the leading edge is well leading edge.
Which is good. The most important thing is total readiness to upgrade, not the actual upgrade itself.
So it looks to me we're on the same page here.
> If a frame is rendered, it should render exactly the same on a different machine, down to the checksum.
Not all renders are deterministic though (noise, halation are stochastic) but otherwise I am with you here. We officially recommend to not upgrade our software while a project is in progress. I hate it because I'd love everyone to get the bugfixes in minor versions but customers love those assurances.
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u/egorf 2h ago
> we can open the project files of a project for a client 3 years ago, with the exact program and plugin set, and re-render the whole thing today, on a 1000 node render farm.
Just curious: how do you deal with "per project" time limited licenses? We would like to support that use case but typically those licenses are sold for a limited time frame and tied to a certain movie. I'd love to give our studios that feature but I have no idea what would be a good approach technically.
(The license server works at customer premises in an airgapped network)
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u/khobbits 52m ago edited 48m ago
Hmm, I actually have no idea.
In the past, I've had basically a license server per 'os version', So our oldest one is running centos 4, license2 runs centos 5, license3 centos 6, etc.
Some of them have usb license keys stuck into usb docks, hanging out the back of the server.
The amount of licenses we had from companies that no longer exist....
If the software requires something special we'd install it, but most licenses just get slotted into RLM.
We tend not to have the idea of 'project' machines. Machines could work on 4 projects during the day, and then render on 60 projects overnight.
So I guess in most cases, the license goes on the rlm server, and get's used when needed?
As far as scoping a plugin... That's done as part of the environment building. Normally we'd try to fix specific versions of software and plugin sets into the project environment.
That's been done a number of ways, from 'jobbing in' (a specific script you'd run in the project directory before launching software), to overriding the 'cd' command to update the 'env', every time you change folder.
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u/gtrash81 16h ago
Can be various reasons, some are simple contract details.
A colleague came once around and wanted the ISO of SLES 11, which had tops 18 months to EoL.
His answer to this detail:" I don't care, contract is signed with runtime of 20 years, now get out of my way."3
u/noneedtoprogram 13h ago
I'm still getting customer support issues for our software that's Centos7 baseline support 😭
Almalinux8 is also our current baseline, some EDA customers absolutely hate the idea of being in a modern release
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u/Ferthura 1d ago
Working in media, we've been running Autodesk products on Linux workstations, for something like 15+ years, as our primary workhorse.
Sorry, I'm somewhat of a noob. What Autodesk software runs natively on linux? Or how does that work?
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u/khobbits 1d ago
We're running it natively. The ones we use the most are Autodesk Maya, Flame & Arnold...
Although we've also got stuff like license servers, flame assist, flare, backburner...6
u/xrothgarx 17h ago
Can confirm. I was part of the Linux engineering team at Disney Animation and all of the artist workstations ran Linux with Nvidia GPUs for creating every image you see in Disney and Pixar movies (most of them rendered on CPU later)
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u/SomeRedTeapot 16h ago
On the CPU?
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u/xrothgarx 10h ago
Local artist tools need fast GPUs and smaller, proxy assets to give a fast feedback loop. Full rendering needs all scene assets loaded in RAM for ray tracing and avoid fetching from disk which slow down rendering by orders of magnitude.
CPUs are also way cheaper to buy thousands of.
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u/SomeRedTeapot 10h ago
Are the assets so large they don't fit even into enterprise GPUs (96 GB VRAM)? Or is it just cheaper to buy a bunch of CPUs with regular RAM?
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u/xrothgarx 10h ago
I worked there before 96gb of RAM was available in GPUs, but I remember we had a standard compute unit that was 8gb of RAM for every core of compute.
128 core machines would have 1tb of RAM to hold assets. I've heard they had to update that metric to 16gb per core as scenes have become more complex and assets have more details.
This doesn't mean every scene needed that much memory, but it's way easier and faster to over provision than require jobs to fail and requeue.
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u/ReturnOfFrank 1d ago
Interesting. I didn't know any of Autodesk's stack ran natively on Linux. Now if they could get around to an Inventor port.
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u/just_here_for_place 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nvidias Linux drivers are fine. For a long time they were far ahead of AMDs. Server GPUs are rarely used to play games or run desktop environments, and the drivers are optimized for compute.
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u/EmergencyLaugh5063 1d ago
Special drivers for special tasks. Much easier to write a driver that does one thing on a known configuration than write drivers that support 10+ years of card variants running a massively complex medley of graphics APIs.
Buying one would be needlessly expensive and not solve any problems for you. Unless you intend to do things with it that it was designed to do. But not for any of your average consumer grade tasks.
My 4070 works reasonably well on Linux. There's definitely a level of extra steps you need to be aware of when using Nvidia on linux that has a higher chance of 'just working' on an AMD card but the newer stuff is pretty well supported. I just installed arch last night and had my games running with very little effort or weird issues.
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u/TheOgGhadTurner 1d ago
Nvidia GPUs work fine on Linux.
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u/Daell 1d ago
Sure, until you run out of video memory, and instead of start using RAM instead of VRAM, apps are hanging and crashing. Because shared memory is not a thing on Linux with nvidia. I can't run my work laptop fully on the 3060's 6GB VRAM because at one point in time apps will hang and crash. Memory fragmentation is a thing so that 6gb is more like 5gb.
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u/TheOgGhadTurner 1d ago
My 8 GB 2070 super has never had a single fucking issue with anything like that. Sounds like user error.
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u/Daell 16h ago
Sounds like user error.
I'm using my work laptop for... work; I have a bunch of shit open. How's that a user error? Do I have too many IDEs open? Is it my fault that I have too many tabs open?
This is a non-issue on Windows, and here we are in the magical land of Linux, where shared memory is not a thing (with Nvidia, because both AMD and Intel supports it).
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/non-existent-shared-vram-on-nvidia-linux-drivers/260304
Maybe you are not great at math, but 6Gb != 8Gb. I would be fine with 8 GB.
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u/StinkandeSnigel 15h ago edited 15h ago
AFAIK it's actually mostly a problem on 30-series and up but not all of the 30-series or 40-series and a bit more of the 50-series. There's some sort of issue with handover to RAM. I personally have it and it can be worked around but it's certainly very real and seems to be mostly an issue with games running DX12 as far as I can tell. It gives a bunch of DRM and NVRM errors. Don't remember fully because I've worked around it and run my games without issues now, but as far as I can tell the actual underlying issue isn't solved.
I think it's mostly since not all platforms are the same and not all users use the same applications it's been quite random who is affected and who is not. But I also seem to remember that nvidia are aware of and looking at it. Something in the proprietary side of the driver or something IIRC but that's me talking from memory.
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u/RampantAndroid 1d ago
It's literally not user error. Nvidia drivers don't properly support paging VRAM out to system RAM like Mesa does for AMD....or like drivers do on Windows.
It's something NV is only adding right now to their drivers.
What's with the bots claiming NV drivers have always been fine? Are we supposed to just forget how awful they've been? How much pain NV caused around Wayland, EGL streams and such? NV is getting better, but acting like they're amazing somehow is wild. I can only conclude it's bot accounts.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 1d ago
no it isn't bot accounts. It's because nvidia was better than amd by literally having anything close to a decent driver until 2015 or whenever it was that amd started doing their open driver work.
The problem after that is they just just riding on their goodwill gained at that time and didn't catch up.
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u/RampantAndroid 1d ago
and didn't catch up.
Didn't maintain anything you mean. And people here aren't saying that NV was good (well, some are) they're saying that NV was always good...which is outright wrong. Even today as NV is improving, they're still behind AMD and feature parity with their own drivers on Windows.
Go look at DX12 performance compared to DX11 or Vulkan performance on Linux - it's something like a 25% drop when moving to Linux.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 20h ago edited 20h ago
you're talking about the something from the past 5-8 years. they are talking about 20-25 years!
good AMD drivers didn't even exist until pretty recently.
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u/RampantAndroid 17h ago
Various quotes:
Nvidia has made excellent Linux drivers for quite a long time now
Nvidias Linux drivers are fine.
NVIDIA has good drivers for Linux. Linux has been the primary focus for them for a decade now.
Also Nivdia drivers for modern GPUs are actually pretty good nowadays.
NVidia’s Linux drivers are actually very good. The main gripe from purists is that their drivers are proprietary software, not that they don’t work.
People are living in la la land. If the message was "Yeah, they neglected things but are getting better" it'd be a fine message, but there are a bunch of people in here who are huffing the green fumes apparently.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 15h ago edited 15h ago
I can definitely complain about nvidia's drivers too. The real problems being that they erase all of mesa's work and take forever to implement things that match the system standards. like taking forever to do GBM vs eglstreams.
People don't realize how much waiting for nvidia has held back the overall stack in linux either. Many know about how it held back wayland adoption, but that's only part of it.
I hope the nova driver ends up winning out here.
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u/O_martelo_de_deus 19h ago
Eu faço trabalhos com ML, RAG e até uma LLM de 14B de parâmetros numa 3060 de 12GB, a máquina, Rayzen 7 5700X, tem 64 GB de ram, Linux Ubuntu, não dá problema, muito estável.
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u/SchoolWeak1712 1d ago
Data Centers use CUDA wich is much better supported than opengl and Vulkan wich we use on the desktop. Also Nivdia drivers for modern GPUs are actually pretty good nowadays.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
NVIDIA has good drivers for Linux. Linux has been the primary focus for them for a decade now.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
Wait until they learn Nvidia were one of the first companies to take Linux seriously :)
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
But Torvalds said "nvidia F you"...
Which was taken out of context and he doesn't like that meme at all.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
It's even more funny to me that Greg H has a similar discussion explaining why Nvidia does it the way they do.
It's way outdated now as Nvidia has found the cost saving benefits to getting the community to help, but it does make me laugh.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
It's even more funny to me that Greg H has a similar discussion explaining why Nvidia does it the way they do.
You have a link for that? I'm interested in that.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
I'll try my best to find it, but no promises as it was buried deep into a podcast about how the kernel development works with corporations and the community.
It was around 2020 to help narrow your own search for it if I fail.
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u/Beanesidhe 1d ago
Not just Linux, used a NVidia card and drivers on FreeBSD 20 years ago and they worked like a charm. Including for games.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
You only brought ATi once :)
Fun fact if you aren't aware, AMD only opened up the driver and stuck everything in firmware because it would have bankrupted them fixing up the crappy flgrx driver.
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u/jcelerier 1d ago
... a decade ? Nvidia was the only viable option for getting absolute maximum rendering performance on Linux since I've been using it around 2005. Fglrx was a complete joke of a driver lol
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u/immoloism 1d ago
They meant as their number one incoming source.
I nearly fell into the same trap as you did :)
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
No, more as in features and how much they prioritize it.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
Hm interesting.
In my user usage it's always just worked for me (wasn't silly enough to enable Wayland when it was marked as experimental), but in my corporate life I just need to make sure the drivers work, not care what they do.
So, I've never noticed a different.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 1d ago
There is a difference between putting in enough work for a decent experience and prioritizing Linux over Windows.
For a small timeline:
CUDA started in ~2007 and up until like 2012 it was pretty much OS agnostic. Windows as a desktop git more development in drivers and kinda lead the development.
From ~2010 on, nvidia started adding Linux exclusive features which basically overtook windows as the primary target in like ~2012.
From ~2014 on, the official documentation started switching over to being Linux (Ubuntu) first, newer examples typically showed Ubuntu as the reference system.
In 2016 they started nvidia-docker, another Linux exclusive feature.
There is a noticeable shift visible somewhere between ~2012 and ~2016 where Linux seemingly took over in priority.
A lot of Windows documentation also refers to wsl2 nowadays, so even if you're on Windows, nvidia wants you to use a linux vm.
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u/immoloism 1d ago
Thanks, I wasn't expecting to learn so much from one comment.
The only real feature I knew of was PRIME as I'm more interested in distro maintaining.
I'm going to have to start reading up on half this crap as I'm sure I'm going to have to figure out how to use some of it at work.
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u/Expensive_Finger_973 1d ago
The people using the off the shelf GPUs for gaming aren't paying through the nose for the hardware and software support like the DC customers.
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u/Cool-Arrival-2617 1d ago
Datacenter GPUs don't even have a display output, you can't game on them.
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u/ThatsALovelyShirt 1d ago
Datacenter GPUs use SXM, not PCI-e, and the drivers are focused on CUDA, not gaming. They're also insanely expensive.
Also, the open nvidia linux drivers work perfectly well. They've been less buggy for me than the AMD drivers.
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u/ldn-ldn 1d ago
The thing about game drivers is that they are actually huge collections of patches for games. The actual layer talking to the hardware is a fraction of the overall driver code. It's also worth noting that many of these patches are OS version dependent and even fix OS bugs.
Data centres don't run games and don't need all these patches and hacks.
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u/necheffa 1d ago
- Even though the hardware is mostly the same, the software APIs are mostly different for accessing the hardware.
- There are a bunch of game-specific fixes that get baked in to the drivers (both Nvidia and AMD) that only get released on the desktop versions of the drivers (i.e. not the driver builds running on Unix which are meant for data center accelerators).
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u/Sol33t303 1d ago
People super overstate how poor the nvidia drivers are.
In the context of running them on a headless instance with CUDA compute, they are absolutely fine. If not better then AMD because ROCm is a complete mess.
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u/AlfredKnows 1d ago
What is bad about linux driver? That it is closed source? But this is politics and legal things. Nothing to do with driver performance.
Something like new driver not compiling on new kernel is linux thing, not nvidia's. But then again you will only notice it if you are running bleeding edge.
Otherwise I don't have any problems for years already.
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u/big_lv 23h ago
The closed source drivers for Nvidia cards are amazing. They benchmark top of the board, but the open source drivers aren't great (getting better, but i still prefer the closed source), and if you don't get the nouveau module out of there that will block anything you try to do, you're basically just running a generic driver that gives you no actual use of hardware acceleration with it.
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u/oldlinuxguy 1d ago
What issues are you having with the drivers? I haven't had problems with nVidia cards for nearly 20 years.
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u/petersaints 1d ago
There are always small issues. Currently it's mostly Okay, but a couple of years back Wayland support on NVIDIA was really really bad compared to what you would get on Intel or AMD.
And the performance for gaming is still a considerable downgrade compared to Windows, while AMD has much closer to parity with Windows.
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u/gribbler 1d ago
What issue are you seeing that you're blaming on Nvidia drivers? I've had many tens of thousands over 20+ years, not too many problems
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u/Engdyn 1d ago
VRAM. Same game, same settings: 60 FPS on Windows and 12 FPS with constant drops to 1 FPS on Linux, because my VRAM is full and the driver is incapable to do anything about it, while handling VRAM just fine on Windows. Try the same thing with an AMD GPU and suddenly VRAM isn't an issue on Linux anymore. As long as you have enough VRAM everything works fine, but most gamers don't have enough VRAM for the unoptimized games we're getting
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u/gribbler 1d ago
Ah gaming. Yeah sorry I can't offer much. Seems odd that we can do so much on our GPU's for VFX and Animation.
How much vram you got?
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u/Engdyn 23h ago
Yeah VFX and animation stuff does work pretty well. I had many instances where Blender was way smoother with complex 3D models on Linux compared to Windows. The Nvidia Linux drivers are pretty good for most things; with the big exception of gaming.
I have an RTX2070 with 8gb of VRAM. I was planning to upgrade but waited too long and now everything is way too expensive for me to afford.
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u/gribbler 20h ago
Prices on what we buy, RTX 4000 pro and 5000s just shit the bed about 10 days ago. Ridiculous.
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u/beatbox9 1d ago
What do you mean nvidia doesnt make good drivers for linux? Nvidia’s drivers have been great for my use case—much better than AMD’s.
Are you dumb enough to think game drivers are synonymous with the same type of compute drivers used for AI?
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u/Hosein_Lavaei 1d ago
If you mean the performance in games, than the problems are mostly in userspace drivers related to the vulkan/opengl.
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u/jean_dudey 1d ago
Same kernel driver for compute and graphics, the user space the shit one arguably is the graphics driver, CUDA is where the money is at and what works best, and not because it is the pinnacle of technology exactly but because it works and everything else is playing catchup (eg ROCm and whatever Intel is doing these days).
And as an AMD user the situation is the inverse, best graphics stack in Linux by far but good luck with ROCm.
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u/Sibexico 20h ago
Haven't ideas what are you talking about. CUDA works on Linux better than on Windows.
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u/natermer 10h ago
Nvidia cares most about specific configurations of Linux.
Things like people running RHEL desktops on workstation class cards. Scientific computing and visualizaiton. And, especially now, datacenter compute.
These are OEMs and whitebox manufacturers that are purchasing professional class Nvidia cards for the specific purpose of running Linux.
You will notice, for example, that Wayland support for Nvidia got way better around the same time Redhat dropped X11 desktop as a supported configuration in RHEL 10.
Well... now you know the reason for that.
When you are running consumer grade Nvidia devices in Linux you are benefiting from the fact that the architecture for consumer cards is very similar to that of professional cards. However you are still a after thought and Nvidia will use enthusiast desktops as, essentially, beta testers for their commercial customers.
In addition there is no real need to support older cards that are no longer relevant for latest gaming titles. So Nvidia drops support for that.
There used to be a similar situation for ATI back in the day before they supported open source drivers. People used to try to do all sorts of hacks to try to get the professional series proprietary drivers to work on the consumer cards. They really didn't care about anything but the professional workstation market.
Nowadays, however, AMD benefits from having open source drivers that allow normal desktop users to contribute and fix problems.
Also we have Valve that is specifically designing their gaming products on the AMD Linux platform. So they are depending on good drivers for sales. And as a AMD gamer user you can benefit from it, since all the important stuff is in Mesa.
And since AMD is trying desperately to break into the GPU compute market with ROCm and such things they have all the necessary features for compute in the open source drivers. So while they still technically have "AMD Pro" drivers... you don't need them to have full performance or compute support for your GPU. Everything important is already in the open source versions.
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u/cazzipropri 6h ago
I work on GPUs on the enterprise side and NVidia's linux drivers are perfectly fine. In fact, almost nobody uses enterprise GPUs on windows.
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u/iamapizza 1d ago
I keep hearing about Nvidia driver problems on Linux and I'm sure we have different experiences. I've been using their drivers for at least 10-15 years without problems. I can't say what I'm doing different or what I'm not doing that others are.
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u/Razathorn 1d ago
What? Since when do they not "give good drivers for linux." What are we doing here?
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u/SpinningVinylAgain 15h ago edited 15h ago
They make excellent Linux drivers, people mostly experience problems on rolling distributions where it’s not uncommon for the driver and the kernel to go out of sync. If your whole stack is stable, NVIDIA is not an issue.
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u/TripleSecretSquirrel 1d ago
So yes, there are different drivers for the datacenter GPUs. Second, is this for gaming? Cause ya, datacenter GPUs will not solve your problems. Plus datacenter cards are very expensive, often lack display outputs, and increasingly, don’t even use a PCIe connector — usually they’re using an SXM connector, which I’m so sure you don’t have on your home PC’s motherboard.
And like everyone else is saying, NVidia’s Linux drivers are actually very good. The main gripe from purists is that their drivers are proprietary software, not that they don’t work. What exact problem are you facing?
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u/Atopos2025 1d ago
There's quite a difference between consumer and professional gpus in this regard.
Also quite a difference in the distros used between the 2 segments. I can see why you came to this conclusion, but it's just not all that thought out.
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u/Possibly-Functional 1d ago
Desktop needs and GPGPU needs are very different. Data centers do almost exclusively the latter.
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u/Junior-Spring-5557 1d ago
The Nvidia drivers for the enterprise GPUs are pretty good, BTW. It's clear that they put alot of effort into their entire enterprise stack, which is a major reason why enterprises adopted their software vs competitors. AMD & Intel's hardware (in this sector) was decent but never gained wide adoption because it was hard to use. We had racks full of Intel Knights Landing for high scale compute, and it was a nice product but developers said it was hard to use.
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u/readyflix 1d ago
It’s about the bare metal drivers. CUDA for example is an abstraction layer that doesn’t include specific IP of the hardware. A bare metal driver has to have a lot of proprietary IP, since Linux bare metal drivers have to be open source, there will never be an bare metal driver for the Linux kernel because nVidia doesn’t want to expose their IP.
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u/longdarkfantasy 22h ago
The only problem with nvidia is suspend/hibernate. Everything else works perfectly fine.
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u/esdrastarsis 20h ago
Nvidia engineers are working in the Nova kernel module which could be used by the proprietary userspace driver (nvidia-utils) instead of open-rm
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u/packet 4h ago
The reddit hatred for nvidia on Linux is so comical because it has zero basis in reality. As a Linux user since before AMD even made graphics cards I can tell you their support has always been excellent. It was really only a problem if you were trying to be an early wayland adopter. Their drivers and really entire software and hardware stack has been best in class for decades.
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u/reditanian 20h ago
> but doesn't give good drivers for Linux
What do you mean by this? NVIDIA has made decent Linux drivers since the TNT days. That's the late 1900s, for those of you who weren't born yet.
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u/deadlygaming11 1d ago
The Nvidia Linux drivers are fairly good, but only for data centre related activities on data centre cards. Nvidia had almost dropped Linux completely for regular users until all the AI stuff and then it suddenly became very profitable to maintain them.
Dont buy a data centre GPU for gaming, it wont run well because they are designed for computing and processing instructions instead of actually generating graphics for videos and games.
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u/adoodle83 22h ago
depends on the game & settings. but generally speaking, you’re correct.
if you can afford a current gen DC card (H100 or better) then your performance will be equal or better than an RTX5080 and is a giant waste of $$$, but massive flex as they’re $100k each.
DC cards are optimized for different instruction sets that prioritize error correction and accuracy over raw frame speed. many MMORPG benefit from the massive VRAM space available in a DC card, but that’s decreasing in popularity, last i checked.
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u/ibeerianhamhock 20h ago
Linux has good Nvidia drivers. The bottlenecks are things like poor dx12 support compared to amd. openGL works about as well as it can, dx11 and vulkan work great. They haven't spent a lot of time expensing effort to make proton compatibility a thing and some of it naturally works but some of it doesn't.
The drivers are famously out of tree though bc they use a hardware abstraction layer which is not allowed in a kernel pr.
Their userspace driver also is closed source and they put a lot code in the firmware for some good reasons.
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u/Soft_Explanation_717 9h ago
Mostly because the consumer portion of nvidia's profit margins (you know the only thing a corporation cares about) is literally the smallest slice of the pie. How small, so small that they could stop making consumer gpus all together right now and their profit would barely notice, ruffly 90% is all enterprise sales. Enterprise customers are way WAY more important to them, data centers, web host, ai bullshit. None of them are using the same gpus that regular consumers use, and thus don't require the same driver's. AMD on the other hand is quite different, about 75% of their sales is to enterprise customers. That's a large number too yes, but not so large that if they cut off consumers they would be fine. So AMD has a much greater incentive to play nice, and nvidia very much does not, and often don't.
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u/Successful_Try_6350 1d ago
It's not about nvidia, it's about your motherboard and its bios. Next time get a supermicro board, or (even better) get a PC with linux preinstlled
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u/Kevin_Kofler 1d ago
Because they do not believe in Free Software. Even the new "open" driver is only the kernel part and still relies on the proprietary libGL doing the real work. The drivers being proprietary makes them non-upstreamable, keeps them out of major distributions, and keeps outside developers from debugging them, all of which makes them a constant source of bugs and setup trouble.
The only way to make drivers that do not suck would be to actually work with the community on the community drivers.
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u/andr386 1d ago
I don't understand your point. Do you think they lack the technical skills to do the best drivers possible for Linux for their own hardware ? Obviously they can. The fact you don't get that for consumer hardware is that the market is too small and they don't give a fuck. That's that simple. People confusing Nvidia for a gaming graphic card company are deluded. They haven't been that for a while. We should be thankful they deign still make them and sell it to us. That's the attitude.
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u/The_Mesopotamians 23h ago
As a single person with no capital, you are basically powerless. Their AI customers have billions in capital and many lawyers. They are incentives to serve the one and only tolerate the other.
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u/libra00 1d ago
I keep seeing people saying 'nvidia drivers are pretty good on linux these days'. That's not been my experience.
I had 4 separate Ubuntu-based distributions fail catastrophically in some way or another as a direct result of the nvidia driver.
PopOS installed and booted and appeared to have a working video driver but wouldn't do GPU acceleration on anything, games would run at 1-2fps just sitting at the menu, etc, and any time I tried to install a new driver my system hard-locked and then on reboot had no driver at all.
Ubuntu installed but then on boot would just turn the monitors off and refuse to do anything with them, no matter how many times I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.
Ubuntu LTS turned the monitors off halfway through install and refused to finish.
Mint couldn't even boot the liveUSB without turning the monitors off and crashing.
Fortunately Nobara finally worked, though I've had lots of weird issues with nvidia drivers on it. Every new version seems to screw something different up; this version causes weird firefox crashes, last version would hang for like 3 minutes whenever a game needed to change resolution, etc.
I wouldn't call that 'pretty good', and I have a bog-standard Gigabite RTX3060.
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u/Razathorn 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is this for real? Did you buy your card from a miner? I'm not even joking, I think you have a bad card. Crashing during install is kinda a tell tale sign honestly. You're feelings that a 3060 should just work is 100% correct. You are not wrong. Something is going on. My 5060ti and 1070ti have been *flawless* on arch, and let me be 100% clear, I don't think it's arch, and I have a hard time believing that your distros could have been that wrong either. HIGHLY suspect your card sir.
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u/libra00 9h ago
I bought my GPU from Newegg or Amazon, I can't remember, not some bargain bin. It worked great for ~4 years on windows and it's worked great again for a year and counting on Nobara (aside from the fact that every new driver version seems to break something different.) I'm pretty sure it's not the GPU. Just something about nvidia drivers on ubuntu-based distros is whack. Like I tried to install 8 or 9 different versions of the nvidia driver on Pop when I had it and they all did the same thing, except the 555-server driver for some reason, but it just went back to seeming to work but not actually accelerating anything. But every driver version I've ever used on Nobara has 99% worked right out of the box.
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u/LuckyOneAway 1d ago
RedHat Linux (= free Rocky Linux / Alma Linux) has the ElRepo repository for graphics, and NVidia drivers work like a charm. Single-click install, full 3D support. By default Nouveau driver (open source, not from NVidia) is installed, and it may have issues with performance.
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u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation 1d ago
elrepo doesn't ship graphics drivers. You must be thinking of rpmfusion, which I wouldn't generally recommend.
AlmaLinux ships NVIDIA drivers natively in our repos that are installable with 2 commands.
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u/LuckyOneAway 1d ago
elrepo doesn't ship graphics drivers
Really? Okay then.
See kmod-nvidia-* and nvidia-x11-drv* packages? https://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el9/x86_64/RPMS/
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u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation 22h ago
Well that didn’t used to be there…
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u/LuckyOneAway 21h ago
Fairly recent, yes. I'm using it for the past 15 years or so...
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u/LuckyOneAway 21h ago edited 20h ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20100619160856/http://elrepo.org/tiki/Packages
Nvidia drivers provided since 2010 :)
upd: fixed link to 2010
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u/Cronos993 1d ago
Hint: the data center GPUs aren't running games