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Well, if you are not gonna use Nvidia’s extra stuff, buy an AMD, by all means.
But what you say is disingenuous. “AI and other software” is not entirely unrelated to gaming. Things like hairworks, physx, and most gameworks in general run on CUDA. And for AI (which I don’t care about that much) there is DLSS, and they are working on AI enhanced rendering.
Most games don’t use those technologies, but some do, and you will miss out on those.
On Windows, Nvidia without thinking twice. On Linux, depends, on rDNA 4 and the next release of Nvidia drivers, but probably still Nvidia.
Unfortunately, despite how much I would rather buy from someone else, AMD’s products are just inferior, especially software.
Examples of AMD being worse:
- AMD’s implementation of opengl is a joke, the open source implementation used on Linux is several times faster and made for free by volunteers, without internal knowledge
- AMD will never run physx, which is every day less relevant, but if AMD from the past had proposed an alternative we would have a standardized physics extension in DirectX by now, like with dlss
- AMD’s ray accelerators are “incomplete” compared to Nvidia RT cores, which is why ray tracing is better on Nvidia, and which is why with rDNA 4 they are changing how they work
- GCN was terrible and very different from Nvidia’s architecture, it was hard to optimize for both. rDNA is more similar, but now AMD has a plethora of old junk to maintain compatible with rDNA
- Nvidia has been constantly investing in new software technologies (nowadays it’s mainly AI), AMD didn’t and now it’s always playing catch up
AMD also has its wins, for example:
- They often make their stuff open source, mainly because it’s convenient for its underdog position
- Has a pretty good software stack on Linux (much better than on windows) partly because it’s not entirely done by them
- Nvidia has been a bad faith actor for many years on the Linux space, even if it’s in its redemption arc
- Modern GPU seems to be catching up in compute performance
- AMD is less greedy with VRAM, mainly because they are less at risk of competing with their own enterprise lineup
- Current Nvidia’s prices are stupid
I would still prefer Nvidia right now, but maybe it’s gonna change with the next releases.
P.s. I have used a GTX 1060, an RX 480, and a Vega 56
Mainly two reasons, one about architecture, and one about vendors
In the PC world, the entire ecosystem is designed to be modular, and people expect to be able to put windows/Linux on any pc and have it work despite the manufacturer. The kernel just wakes up on one of the cores, figures out the CPU, wakes the rest of the cores, and from there it figures out the rest of the computer. By contrast arm systems are tightly integrated, each SoC is unique and there’s no way to figure out the rest of the system, the kernel wakes up on one of the cores, reads out what SoC this is, and mostly has to already know the chip and any additional hardware connected to it.
But, sure, there are only so many SoCs (kinda), and displays, cameras, and touchscreens are mostly similar, you are bound to find a way to tell the kernel what hardware is running on and have it work, right? Except a lot of phone hardware is proprietary (duh) and requires bespoke proprietary drivers, google pretends to encourage vendors to submit their drivers upstream, but this doesn’t really happen. Now, if you are familiar with running external drivers on Linux, you probably know how picky the kernel is in what to load, but android’s kernel is specifically modified to be less picky, to allow vendors more slack. Mind you, the API is not more stable, the kernel is just less picky.
Bonus: running Linux on arm laptops is indeed proving kind of a challenge (nothing impossible, but resources are limited), that’s because they are built like a mobile phone.