AMD, easily. Its literally plug and play. You can even pick some second hand options for cheap that are still solid for gaming such as the vega 56/64 and the RX 5700XT (which is I use). Intel isn’t bad so long as you’re not playing the newest stuff, my Arc a750 is solid in games like Fallout 4 and Elden Ring. Starfield is complete mess on it. Another thing with Intel is you’ll need a distro with a 6+ kernel to get the most out of it.

well…

Definitely AMD. The drivers are actually open source, much better with less bugs and there are no problems known to me. I currently have had a GTX 1070 for the last 5 years, until I’ve enough money for an AMD card. My setups, especially Wayland based, are riddled with bugs not present on my (Intel based) laptop - which means the only explanation is the NVidia card. The (admittedly: testing on Arch) drivers have broken two times in a year, not making the system unusable but definitely preventing gaming.
On top of that, the 4090 may be 25% better than the 7900 XTX - but it’s also 50+% more expensive than the 7900 XTX, which is a pattern which can be seen for every generation and version of GPUs by Nvidia/AMD. Nvidia’s equivalents to AMD’s cards are generally 25-50% more expensive, with worse performance but better Raytracing and of course DLSS support - oh wait, DLSS 1 and 2 are only for RTX 20 and up, while DLSS 4 is only for 40 Series GPUs. Which means no matter how good it looks, FSR will be the only alternative for almost all players, even those using NVidia cards like me.

Something different: Intel’s Arc GPUs would maybe be worth a shot. According to a PC World article, the A770 beats the 3060 even in it’s own habitat - Raytracing. It’s cheap and gets better with every driver update. It also seems like the Arc GPUs are compatible with Linux fine, though I’d suggest you look up the compatibility with the games you want to play.

If I were buying a card right now I’d get either the 6700XT or the 6800XT because they’re both at crazy good value for the money right now, especially if you can get one used or refurbished from a reputable seller with a return policy.

AMD is generally better

STOP recommending Intel Arc for Linux, people. Do any of you saying that even own one?

I had a gtx1060 when I started using linux, then upgraded to 2060 then again to 2080, they all worked fine without any major problem (except that file system checking at boot sometimes and wayland). Last year I upgraded to RX6800 and man everything just works, no more filesystem checks at boot, Wayland is mu way to go now.

If I have a nvidia card now I would just use, but if I’m buying a new/used gpu it will definitely be AMD.

For gaming and desktop use, I’ve had a flawless experience using AMD cards and a decent time with NVIDIA. The only reason I’m with NVIDIA now is for the AI capabilities (don’t bother trying to run stuff using AMD’s ROCm - it’s near impossible to install).

I bought a Rx 5700xt for 190€ in Germany this was 4 month’s ago

Literally Intel or AMD. You may pick Intel dGPU as well.

This sums up my feelings on Nvidia.

“Better” is relative to your own use case. If you’re a casual user, who maybe play some games on Linux, and don’t really care about getting those games to work with Nvidia’s version of ray tracing upscaling stuff, getting an AMD card is no brainer because it’s cheaper and works out of the box too, and many games are starting to support ray tracing and upscaling on AMD card as well.

But, if you absolutely need to have access to CUDA, RTX and DLSS, then you’ll have to get an Nvidia card and deal with consequences of using their drivers (buggy on Wayland, etc).

Not Nvidia, they do not play well with Linux. I’ve had all sorts of weird problems that I’ve traced back to driver errors caused by Nvidia, both proprietary and open source.

I just swapped from NVidia to AMD, since Proton was not working under NVidia for Starfield at launch (and I’ve generally been unhappy using NVidia for a while).

I can finally also use things like Wayland where NVidia just doesn’t support it well enough to be a good option (e.g., weird issues with full disk encryption unlock screen, no night light support)

I know CUDA and productivity apps might push you in the other direction, but if your main priority is gaming, I suspect AMD will be nicer. My first impressions is that it plays way better with Linux and reduces headaches that shouldn’t exist but you’ll deal with under Nvidia.

AMD is better on Linux most of the time. Running a AMD card day one is not hassle free.

That being said if you pick a up to date distro all 7000 and 6000 series should work fine now. They are already in the kernel and mesa for a while. You may want to update you kernel and mesa sometimes to get better performance and stability.

But in my experience nvidia is fine on Linux. (I only used older cards gtx 970 and a rtx 2060) especially when you have just one monitor or all monitors on the same refresh rate. It’s not on par with windows but will work with the Nvidia drivers.

So I would say if you a simple setup Nvidia is fine and AMD is better. It all depends on the best deal you can get. If ray tracing is not that important AMD is new the best value. If you more on a budget second AMD Rx 5700 XT are pretty cheap here and there are some good deals on Nvidia 30 series cards.

As far I have read intel cards can be a pain on Linux. So I would not recommend it for now.