I have been offered a choice between these two cards, and I’m not sure which one will perform better in linux at this point. If it was Windows I would just go with the Nvidia and call it a day, but the driver situation on Linux has me leaning towards AMD. Is the AMD the right choice?
I’m using the Garuda distro.
Btw, if you ever need to compare GPUs on Linux, use https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Graphics/
https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Graphics/AMD+Radeon+RX+64,NVIDIA+GeForce+GTX+980+Ti
The performance between the two – VRAM aside – is apparently significantly closer on Windows than in Linux, which I assume why OP is asking.
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/3218vs3808/GeForce-GTX-980-Ti-vs-Radeon-RX-Vega-64
The AMD card tends to slightly pull ahead on Windows too, but it’s a much closer thing there.
In the meta-review at launch of the V64, it was 95-98% of a 1080:
https://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/launch-analyse-amd-radeon-rx-vega/launch-analyse-amd-radeon-rx-vega-seite-2 (German but the table is self-explanatory)
980 ti was about 7% behind a 1070 at its launch; over 20% behind a 1080: https://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/launch-analyse-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070/launch-analyse-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-seite-2
I’m leaning towards declaring PassMark’s GPU bench not being a very representative benchmark.
A very safe assumption.