Here's a dumb idea?

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pavel

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I have yet another one of those dumb ideas....

I'm hoping Linux users reply - who have used video editors like Shotcut and KDenlive among others. Oh, it would be really interesting if you use Blender!

I was looking into upgrading my EVGA 3060 to a 3080 / 3080 Ti or 3090 - but, I plan on dual booting Ubuntu and Fedora on a separate M.2 NVMe SSD (1 or 2TB) and Windows 10 (I have 10 Pro installed, currently) or 11 on another NVMe SSD.

Eventually, I'll want a faster/better gpu - I just got the 3060 to hold me over - it allowed me to finish my recent build.

But, Nvidia is a bit of a hassle in Linux. If I got a 6900 XT, it would be smooth usage in Linux but when using Davinci Resolve/Premiere Pro/Blender in Windows, it would cause tasks (rendering /3D) to take longer to complete. If I keep my 3060, I could either A) use it as a backup or B) build a 2nd system - and put the 3060 in there or an AMD card for a dedicated Linux build.

Which of my ideas is the best or the least crazy?

Is there any way to do this?

I am sure the 7900 XT will be too expensive - I am looking at used gpus - the 3060 has held value but to be honest, I doubt I can find a buyer to get my $$ back. If I was to sell it and only have an AMD card, I might regret it if using the video editing software and 3D (Blender) - causes my work to take longer.

Any ideas? I think any suggestions will be better than mine. :)

Just make do with Nvidia (Nvidia gpu in Linux)? Bit the lip and use the 3060 (don't upgrade?) and see what happens or upgrade to 6900 XT or 3080 Ti etc.?
 
I feel one question here, would a 3060 often enough beat a 6900xt enough to go over any trouble would you got one ?

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-rx-6900-xt-review,28.html

RX6900-XT-PugetBench-Overall-Score.jpg


Even the Ti version does not beat it by that much.

Obviously an windows render box even if not much faster would be interesting to have regardless of the performance boost, has it leave your main workstation free during the work load and having already a major piece (GPU) could make it quite cheap to do, I imagine a cheap CPU with that 3060, small NVME, large cheap data drive could do the trick for a very nice machine when they are GPU load.

Ampere tend to destroy RDNA 2 in those workload relative to their relative gaming performance tier and even MSRP price, but does the gap big enough for someone with an 6900xt to take extra steps to use a 3060 instead ?
 
LukeTbk said:
I feel one question here, would a 3060 often enough beat a 6900xt enough to go over any trouble would you got one ?

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-rx-6900-xt-review,28.html

View attachment 531242

Even the Ti version does not beat it by that much.

Obviously an windows render box even if not much faster would be interesting to have regardless of the performance boost, has it leave your main workstation free during the work load and having already a major piece (GPU) could make it quite cheap to do, I imagine a cheap CPU with that 3060, small NVME, large cheap data drive could do the trick for a very nice machine when they are GPU load.

Ampere tend to destroy RDNA 2 in those workload relative to their relative gaming performance tier and even MSRP price, but does the gap big enough for someone with an 6900xt to take extra steps to use a 3060 instead ?
Click to expand...
Can you elaborate? Are you saying/suggesting to build a 2nd system? You're right, I think the 6900 XT only 'beats' the 3060 in Davinci Resolve by a bit. However, even used - a used 3080 10GB, is about the same price (*used). As you can see, it beats both of them.

In Blender, the Nvidia cards outperform AMD cards, even the higher end - by using OptiX (and even with CUDA):

https://www.phoronix.com/review/blender-32-gpus

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...ontent-creation-review/#GPU_Rendering_Blender

The problem with building a '2nd system/machine' - even cheap cpu, gpu, case, RAM/memory - $ probably adds up to the cost of any of these high end graphics cards or more? :-/
 
pavel said:
Can you elaborate? Are you saying/suggesting to build a 2nd system? You're right, I think the 6900 XT only 'beats' the 3060 in Davinci Resolve by a bit. However, even used - a used 3080 10GB, is about the same price (*used). As you can see, it beats both of them.
Click to expand...
I am really not good in English, why I am trying to say

If you get a 6900xt (which I imagine it would be worth it to fight to make an Ampere work instead by how faster they are) but if you do, I am not sure the 3060 is faster than a 6900xt by enough in enough scenario to not just use the 6900xt all the time that you use a single video card, at least it is worth to be sure before going into the trouble.

But that it should be worth it regardless of the second card to use both and a render box would be nice regardless of that.

pavel said:
The problem with building a '2nd system/machine' - even cheap cpu, gpu, case, RAM/memory - $ probably adds up to the cost of any of these high end graphics cards or more? :-/
Click to expand...
That a good point, maybe the cost of a 6900xt + extra to still use the 3060 you end up being able to buy an used 3080/3090 instead but the premise seem to be about wanting to have an AMD card ? All the conversation start with the premise in the message: If I got a 6900 XT,
 
pavel said:
Can you elaborate? Are you saying/suggesting to build a 2nd system? You're right, I think the 6900 XT only 'beats' the 3060 in Davinci Resolve by a bit. However, even used - a used 3080 10GB, is about the same price (*used). As you can see, it beats both of them.

In Blender, the Nvidia cards outperform AMD cards, even the higher end - by using OptiX (and even with CUDA):

https://www.phoronix.com/review/blender-32-gpus

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...ontent-creation-review/#GPU_Rendering_Blender

The problem with building a '2nd system/machine' - even cheap cpu, gpu, case, RAM/memory - $ probably adds up to the cost of any of these high end graphics cards or more? :-/
Click to expand...

Having looked at the Phoronix benchmarks. If it was me I'd go AMD for the better user experience with drivers. The slightly added time for rendering wouldn't bother me. However, it may bother you.

Ubuntu does an OK job with Nvidia drivers but you may want to consider Ubuntu based distros that do it better. Pop_OS! by Systems76 is a good option. Another option would be a rolling release distro. While I'm on an all AMD based system now my previous computer was Nvidia GPU and when on Arch Linux it was pretty simple to make sure it all worked. I never had any driver issues. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
 
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Instead of two systems, why not just use the NVIDIA card as an accelerator? You could use the AMD card as your primary display device, and just have the NVIDIA card for NVENC, CUDA, etc. Would save you money from having to build a second system, and you can always block the NVIDIA GPU kernel drivers from loading in GRUB to prevent Linux from even seeing it.

One thing to consider though is that it's looking like an officially supported Linux NVIDIA open source driver is on the way at some point. So, you could wait it out and see how it goes. No guarantees of course, but something to consider. Link

I will say though, having two systems is nice. I currently have a two system setup where my old desktop is my primary Linux workstation running Fedora, and my laptop runs Windows. It's nice having both available for when I can't get a game to run on Linux, and it's also nice to be able to leverage the RTX 3060 in my laptop for handbrake encodes while playing a game on my desktop. Having two machines available to spread out compute loads comes in handy more often than you might think. I got tired of dual booting and having to reboot all the time. Splitting things up has greatly simplified my computing use.

Good luck with whichever path you take.
 
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Vermillion said:
Having looked at the Phoronix benchmarks. If it was me I'd go AMD for the better user experience with drivers. The slightly added time for rendering wouldn't bother me. However, it may bother you.

Ubuntu does an OK job with Nvidia drivers but you may want to consider Ubuntu based distros that do it better. Pop_OS! by Systems76 is a good option. Another option would be a rolling release distro. While I'm on an all AMD based system now my previous computer was Nvidia GPU and when on Arch Linux it was pretty simple to make sure it all worked. I never had any driver issues. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
Click to expand...
Sorry for the delay in my reply. I read that you (probably?) need the proprietary amdgpu-pro drivers (incl. Mesa & Vulcan?) for some software - Davinci Resolve for e.g.? Blender, too, perhaps?
I guess I am still confused about it. I don't know if it would bother me or not. I guess I'll find out - how fast or slow it is (depending on whether I get an Nvidia card or AMD. Update: I found a good deal on an RTX 3080 12GB (used).

I am familiar with Ubuntu so that was going to be the daily driver and I would add something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it looks really nice and supposedly, it is progressing nicely with Wayland/Nvidia/KDE which is a bit of a shocker. I had problems with the latest Fedora - although I was just trying a live usb iso.

Lunar said:
Instead of two systems, why not just use the NVIDIA card as an accelerator? You could use the AMD card as your primary display device, and just have the NVIDIA card for NVENC, CUDA, etc. Would save you money from having to build a second system, and you can always block the NVIDIA GPU kernel drivers from loading in GRUB to prevent Linux from even seeing it.

One thing to consider though is that it's looking like an officially supported Linux NVIDIA open source driver is on the way at some point. So, you could wait it out and see how it goes. No guarantees of course, but something to consider. Link

I will say though, having two systems is nice. I currently have a two system setup where my old desktop is my primary Linux workstation running Fedora, and my laptop runs Windows. It's nice having both available for when I can't get a game to run on Linux, and it's also nice to be able to leverage the RTX 3060 in my laptop for handbrake encodes while playing a game on my desktop. Having two machines available to spread out compute loads comes in handy more often than you might think. I got tired of dual booting and having to reboot all the time. Splitting things up has greatly simplified my computing use.

Good luck with whichever path you take.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that was my anticipation - having to dual boot/reboot so much. I might be in the middle of doing something on one OS - and it will be a pain (inconvenience) to 'finish' whatever task it is - and shut everything down b4 rebooting. If I had a 2nd system - you just switch video inputs and the other computer can be left alone. However, that's really costly for the convenience.

I'm not sure what you mean about an 'accelerator.' Can you elaborate?
For some reason, I think I'll regret whatever choice I make - I'll wish I bought the other card. If I buy both and have a 2nd system, then I'll be happy with one of them, at least. :D
 
I'll just chime in that with Linux, you can disable the "mitigations" designed to defend against attacks on the CPU's design itself (Spectre and the like).
If you want raw performance from the CPU also, and use this mode sparingly, you might get more out of the hardware.

I'm not, however, a video editor, and I don't know if there are any issues with the current nVidia drivers under Linux. I have Mint21, I have a vintage 1050Ti, and it "just works". No idea about the new stuff.
 
michalrz said:
I'll just chime in that with Linux, you can disable the "mitigations" designed to defend against attacks on the CPU's design itself (Spectre and the like).
If you want raw performance from the CPU also, and use this mode sparingly, you might get more out of the hardware.

I'm not, however, a video editor, and I don't know if there are any issues with the current nVidia drivers under Linux. I have Mint21, I have a vintage 1050Ti, and it "just works". No idea about the new stuff.
Click to expand...
Mint - based on Ubuntu - use a similar philosophy nowadays - you just enable the 'Additional Drivers' repo - and then install.... really easy and quick. Some other distros - Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE - require more work but it's because they have more of the 'free software' value system. So, you need to install other repositories that add Nvidia - it's not that hard and I tried it in on a live usb recently. The problems are the xorg and Wayland stuff - Nvidia support for Wayland was pretty poor until recently. Also, when there's changes and upgrades/updates with Gnome/KDE, etc. and other stuff - things might break or there might be bugs. Long story, short - there's some software that needs proprietary drivers - so I chose Nvidia for my graphics card or I would have switched to AMD.

Edit: I forgot about the disabling stuff - of the mitigations - good point....and interesting, yeah.
 
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Nvidia under Linux. Performance is great, drivers are (despite what the fanbois in r/linuxgaming try to claim) rock stable and in the case of most distro's easy to install using your distro's package manager.

People run into issues regarding Nvidia under Linux when they run bleeding edge kernels or install the drivers using Nvidia's .sh script, which bypasses the package manager altogether and overwrites needed dependencies and libraries. Stay a kernel release back, you'll have a more stable system overall and your Nvidia drivers will chug away nicely in the background.

In fact if you plan on running Ubuntu LTS releases, or any distro based on Ubuntu LTS releases, Nvidia propriatery drivers hold a distinct advantage due to the fact that LTS runs a kernel that's a few releases back. Meaning if you were running an AMD card you may find yourself running outdated drivers.
 
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