Video Cards

[SoldierOfFilth]

It is to my understanding that AMD and ATI is the way to go for linux users and with my starting school in 9 days I am looking at building a new rig for animation. However, all the high end video cards on Newegg seem to have been bought up by litecoin and bitcoin miners. Has anyone else had this problem, and do any of you know of any other trusted sources for buying hardware?

 

[lobo]

ATI is now known as AMD.

I would not necessarily agree that AMD is the way to go. AMD and Nvidia both have their problems, but if you want good performance and trouble free operation with the proprietary driver - Nvidia is probably your best option.

For open source drivers it's far more complex when trying to choose between the two. I would not know which is the better of the two as I only use old hardware. The FOSS drivers tend to lag behind the proprietary ones in terms of features, performance and functionality. The FOSS Nvidia driver stack - nouveau - is a reverse engineered independent project, but is progressing well and you can get decent enough 3D acceleration on older hardware. The FOSS radeon stack is developed with assistance from AMD and the driver requires microcode (blobs) for DRI and other functionality. Despite this I've seen nouveau perform better - but I've also seen it pretty much unusable in some cases.

 

[DevynCJohnson]

The Raspberry Pi hardware is excellent (in my opionion). However, if someone is looking for a powerful system (especially for cryptocurrency), I would recommend different hardware.

 

[Yesyesloud]

Out of personal experience with older and recent discrete graphics cards, I would generally say that, regardless of brand, if you want better performance and less headaches, just load proprietary drivers, you paid for them anyway.

I had a lot of trouble with three Nvidia cards of different generations on GNU/Linux, however I managed to get them to work properly; while AMD/ATI GPUs andAPUs worked fine mostly - I experienced minor, specific issues with my laptop APU, like desktop freezing when HDMI is disconnected before the multi-monitor setup is manually reconfigured, no big deal. Hardware compatibility problems can be very subjective and need-dependent, they also depend on the combination of components, making this matter even trickier.

Narrowing this answer to fit your particular questions (not really hah), which I guess is the whole point of this thread... I recently built a rig with used parts purchased on eBay, doing everything on my side to make sure they were in good condition. Great stuff for around half the retailer price. Assuming you prefer shiny new hardware, as the cards you wanted were sold out on Newegg, Tigerdirect is a reasonable alternative.

 

[ryanvade]

I always recommend Nvidia. Those few times I have had ATI (AMD now) cards issues always occured. Even when using Windows.

I have never had an issue with Nvidia. BUT, your question is extremely opinionated. There are really no facts to say which to choose. Personal preference is key.