FOSS driver only, the choices are AMD and Intel. Nvidia is out of the picture.

Of coursenouveau drivers are still around and under active development, but as far as I know the performance if still very far from reasonable expectations.

From what i’ve heard if your not willing to use the nvidia proprietary drivers then DON’T go for nvidia you will get terrible performance and amd will always be significantly better.

If you consider the proprietary drivers then I think it depends on your use case. For example AMD is better value if your gaming without ray tracing if you want to play with ray tracing or do any kind of productivity Nvidia is generaly the better option. For machine learning Nvidia has much better compatibility with everything so you will have a better time and better performance, Although if you only care about running the largest models you can with the available vram then AMD gpu’s will have more vram for the price.

Intel arc is also always an option if you are aiming for a lower tire/mid range card. They have really price competitive cards and unlike amd they have very decent ray tracing and productivity capability’s. They also have lots more vram for the price compared to Nvidia.

Also I highly recommend buying a used graphics card, you help the environment, save a lot of money and if you don’t like the card you chose you can sell it for the same price your bought it and buy a different one.

Maybe if you could specify your use case and what cards you are currently looking at I could help you out more.

Like others have already said, if you want Foss drivers then AMD is your only choice.

However, if you want the most performant cards on the market then you can safely choose nvidia. The drivers work really well now, no tinkering required. Even multi monitor vrr works now with the latest drivers.

Stop listening to what people are parroting, nvidia used to be a bad choice, but not anymore. Even Linus Torvalds has changed his mind

So, when AI people came in, that was wonderful, because it meant somebody at NVIDIA had got much more involved on the kernel side, and NVIDIA went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of people who are doing really good work.

If you don’t want proprietary drivers the choice is quite straightforward: AMD. The official drivers are open source.

As for my experience, I’ve had absolutely no problems in the last few years with AMD, but I have to admit that I have always been using an iGPU, which has always been good enough for my needs.

I used to have problems with Nvidia proprietary drivers, but that was at least a couple years ago, things might have changed. I’ve never had issues with the free unofficial drivers, besides worse performance.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers

So then you don’t want any NVIDIA.

The AMD open source Linux driver performs better than their Windows driver. And there is no proprietary AMD Linux driver, the official AMD driver for Linux is open source.

As someone who started using Linux while on Nvidia and stuck with it for over a year before going full AMD.

Just go AMD, so many little things I had to find workarounds for just because of Nvidias shitty drivers.

Even after Nvidia claimed to support wayland I could never get it to run on my install, then having to manually configure my xorg just to get my 170hz monitor working which then introduced graphical issues I just couldn’t fix…NONE of that was an issue the moment I swapped to a RX 7800 XT, didn’t even have to install any drivers they’re just standard in the kernal.

I don’t want any proprietary drivers (so I am talking about Nouveau or any other FOSS Nvidia driver if it exists)

In that case AMD, no doubt about it.

If you were considering proprietary drivers it would still be AMD but there would be some discussion about it.

Do you play a lot of games with ray tracing, or do you care about that stuff? If you don’t then AMD, it’s better bang for the buck for rasterization and works better on Linux.

If you want Nvidia Reflex,DLSS and RTX and GSYNC,etc and your fine with installing out of tree proprietary drivers and fine with some minor issues(Like rarely breaking randomly) Nvidia If you don’t care about Nvidias features AMD.

AMD cards work great with the open source driver. As i understand it, the nouveau driver is getting better but might not be there yet? So if the non-proprietary driver is a must you might be better off with AMD.

Anything but Nvidia

I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.

If you’re on Linux AMD is clearly superior because NVidia has Linux performance issue compared to Windows so you’re ending up paying more for less. However NVidia has the monopole for a reason their product are superior but at what price ? Also if you want to avoid proprietary drivers AMD gets the win too.

I do think AMD is the better option for anyone that spend less than 800-1’000$ on a GPU even for Windows gamers. Personnaly I have made the switch from NVidia to AMD 2 years after ditching Windows for Linux, Never looked back even though Cyberpunk2077 looks amazing on NVidia RTX and some other things.

I have upgraded last year to a RX 7800 XT and have no regrets on spending that money.

if( you need CUDA ){ Use Nvidia (note that OSs officially supported by CUDA often use “old” versions of linux, like Debian 12 (6.1) or Fedora 39 (6.8), I personally use Arch); } else { Use AMD, you will have less problems and it’ll probably be easier to setup; }

Everyone’s gonna suggest AMD here because of your requirement of no-proprietary drivers; but unless you’re some sort of high-value target to a foreign government, I honestly choose the more pragmatic route of just using the proprietary NVidia driver and going NVidia. Especially if I’m not budget constrained on card.

The fact of the matter is, AMD has just simply fallen behind. NVidia cards are (and have been for like 3 generations now) more performant. There is good reason why they dominate the market right now; they’re just simply better.

It really depends on how far you want to take your zealotry on open source; there are parts of the CPU microcode that can see everything you do. Those are proprietary. Your bios is proprietary. You’re probably running 100 different proprietary blobs even IF you choose not to use the drivers that NVidia supplies; so why hobble yourself with a slower card that doesn’t have CUDA instructions? (often also very good for AI work if you are interested in that at all)

I certainly understand wanting to push that direction for the sake of pushing that direction but - is performance and stability less important than using a proprietary driver?