> I am definitely rooting for AMD to wow us next generation like they did in the CPU market.

Don't set your expectations too high. Their next generation of consumer graphics cards, rumored to be announced at CES next week, are reportedly still going to be based on a new revision of their current GCN architecture (which originally debuted in 2011 and is very much showing its age these days). Rumored performance for the "high-end" model will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070 (though reportedly at a much lower price compared to either of those cards).

If you're waiting for them to produce an all-new GPU architecture the rumors are that they are working on one to be launched in the 2020-2021 timeframe. That's also when Intel is rumored to be preparing to launch their own dedicated GPUs so hopefully we will be going from 0 properly high-end GPUs with open-source drivers to 2 by 2021.

I got an amd fury x a while back because the nvidia binary drivers regressed severely with my old card, and I wanted 4K anyway.

It’s by far the best Linux GPU I’ve ever encountered, and that’s with open source drivers don’t set the kernel taint bit.

Its performance in benchmarks was much better than the comparably priced NVIDIA. It is also the quietest gamer GPU I’ve encountered (I bought one with slightly nicer fans).

Maybe things have changed (but the 1080 was certainly out back then), but this card wins on every metric other than CUDA support (nonexistent) and absolute performance (close enough to fastest, and certainly overkill for my Linux Steam collection at 4K).

I'm not saying that AMD's current cards are slouches (I'm planning to buy one myself this year when I build my next computer) but they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models (the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX) which is what I mean by "properly high-end". Those are admittedly niche products due to their high pricing but it is important for AMD to have a competitive product in that segment since many people don't do a lot of research and if all they know about GPUs is "Nvidia has the fastest cards" (or an equally-uninformed salesperson tells them that) and buys a 1060 over a 580 based on that "knowledge" then AMD lost a sale.

> they certainly do not meet the performance bar set by Nvidia's current high-end models

Assuming you can't tell the difference between, say, 100fps and 150fps, isn't the 'performance bar' a bit arbitrary after a certain point if the hardware runs the vast majority of the software thrown at it?

Objectively you are correct. However, as the rest of my comment indicates there are important marketing and brand-value perception reasons to have a true high-end card: how many professional gamers (streamers, e-sports, extreme overclockers, etc.) who do buy this class of GPU are there playing with AMD cards vs Nvidia cards? How many (tens/hundreds of) millions of views do they collectively get playing games with Nvidia hardware? Nvidia has likely gotten millions of dollars in effectively free marketing just for having these cards.

AMD's GPU market share has been shrinking with the general gaming audience despite the fact that their mid-range cards have been very price-competitive with Nvidia's offerings during the same time period they've lacked serious competition at the high-end. While focusing on the mid-range where the highest volume of GPUs are sold is the rational market strategy it may not be a winning market strategy in the real world.

> will be somewhere around the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070

Aren't those still adequate to run like, 99.9% of all games on the market? I would (and do) gladly pay for hardware that isn't the absolute fastest if the manufacturer employs a Linux driver team to make that hardware work on Linux.

I agree with you however as I explained in my reply to hedora there are important reasons why AMD should have a card in this performance class.

> Back then the proprietary Nvidia driver kept much better Pace with their windows offering. Last I checked their proprietary Linux driver was almost a year behind (point release wise) the windows offering.

Am I reading this right? Nvidia's drivers were never out of sync for a year with regard to the supported GPUs, OpenGL and Vulkan features. It's easy to see that looking at the Vulkan beta drivers page at https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver. (That's just a convenient example, non-beta drivers follow the same cadence but there no single page I can link.)

AMD GPU hardware is definitely competitive, they just aren't top of the line. At the mid range, they are very competitive, and that's what most people need anyway.

My next GPU will be an AMD GPU, as soon as my GTX 960 stops being sufficient (and no Wayland is certainly an issue).

In fact, when buying graphics cards I am looking much more on the driver support than on the pure FPS performance. I have a Dell XPS with NVIDIA graphics and an AMD RX460 in my desktop PC.

And in my experience, the NVIDIA driver landscape is just a mess. The state of Nouveau can be obtained from the article above and the proprietary driver causes all kinds of weird issues (e.g. UI spinners rotating at different speeds, fans turning faster than they are supposed to be, etc.). On the other hand, the (open source) AMD driver seems to have evolved quite well over the last years.

As a result, I hate my NVIDIA card and like my AMD card quite much. Every time I see those steam survey results I wonder why there are still so many people buying NVIDIA cards for their Linux boxes. They probably just trust the benchmarks and don't compare the experience first hand.

In the last 6 years I've used a 7870, 290, and 580 as my desktops GPU. All have been stellar cards that have only gotten better over time.

Back when I got that 7870 circa 2012 I was taking a major risk - at the time the 6870 was the premiere foss card and radeonSI was brand new with growing pains. The 290 was another risk being the first major architecture update to GCN. But I was validated in both purchases with usable cards at first that within a few months became excellent.

I've played a lot of the major Linux AAA releases on these cards shortly after release - Borderlands 2, Civ 5, Metro Last Light / Redux, Tomb Raider, etc. There used to be quite a few bugs at release and glitches. Nowadays everything is pristine. And I get about twice the framerate in BL2 today than I did four years ago on that 290.

I'm almost certainly going to buy a Navi card next unless we have another crypto bomb ruin the market again.

AMD GPUs are definitely competitive unless you made a business out of computing things in GPU. For most daily tasks like graphics (games) or even moderate number crunching (OpenCL), AMD GPUs are perfectly usable and high value.

How big is the gap between opencl and cuda right now?

These days Vulkan can be used for compute as well, and it gives the user a far more refined interface than OpenCL. There's very little reason to limit oneself to the latter.

Any Vulkan library you can suggest? Last time I checked Vulkan, it required enormous amount of boilerplate just to connect GPU, compile, send data and run code. So, I ended up using OpenCL for years. Unless there are good high level libraries around I would still stick to OpenCL.