RTX 4070 vs 7900XTX Fedora 43

Ask Fedora
1

Hey there !

I am at Fedora 43 Workstation with an AMD ryzen 7 5700x and 32gb RAM. I am a bit worried with the Performance of my RTX 4070. I am thinking about switching to a RX 7900 XTX and got an offer for 750 Euro. Would this be a good idea or should I stay with Nvidia.

Thanks in advance.

2

Big advantage of AMD-based cards is that they don’t require an out of tree driver, the driver is baked into kernel.

3

I believe it would be a great idea.

There are two significant benefits here:

One, as you mentioned, the performance is significantly faster.

The second is the driver itself. Unlike Nvidia, where the most common driver needs to be installed via external sources, such as rpmfusion, and can occasionally break if the Linux kernel is newer than the NVIDIA driver.

The common AMDGPU driver is built into the Linux kernel itself. Every time you get a Linux Kernel and Mesa upgrade, you are technically getting driver updates as well. This also means your GPU drivers being up-to-date is dependent on your distro updating the Linux kernel and Mesa. On, say, Debian Stable, you would have older GPU drivers. On Fedora, they will be very new.

Being baked into the kernel leads to a more stable experience, as the driver is built in and tested directly against the kernel by kernel developers. It is a more “first-party” experience that will tend to receive stronger and more reliable testing.

Nvidia is a decent Linux experience in 2025, but AMD is a “native” experience.

Both work, but AMD is a team player; Nvidia is built primarily in-house, separate from kernel developers, so kernel developers don’t have as much influence in doing things the “right way” as they do with AMD.

To paraphrase, AMD drivers are a core, well-known part of the recipe; it is expected and known to work well with the rest of the ingredients. Nvidia drivers are a new spice added on top that isn’t part of the original recipe. It tastes great on its own, but you don’t know if it will taste good when mixed with the rest until the recipe is completed; it could either be great or bad (e.g., early Wayland issues with Nvidia).