this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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There is no best. Only least worst. Pick your poison:
AMD: Libre driver stack, require firmware blobs.
NVidia: Proprietary driver stack (kernel driver component slowly being opened), proprietary firmware exists in ROM on card so doesn't need to be loaded at runtime.
Intel: Libre driver stack, same firmware issue as with NVidia, GPU performance generally sucks because iGPU constraints
I would say, in order from least-worst to most-worst:
AMD
Intel
NVidia
Others that I have considered, but are hopeless pipe dreams
Matrox - old, deprecated, dead, no longer in business?
S3 Chrome - assimilated into Centaur/VIA technologies, later bought out by Intel
Mali - don't even kid yourself
Software rendering - you must be desperate
Aspeed and other 2D framebuffer solutions - good luck
Any and every "open source GPU" initiative - always dead in the water. NLnet recently pulled funding from LibreSOC because the lead dev spent more time begging for e-gold than doing any developmental work.
Prob the most detailed explanation here
You may not have considered the Intel Arc GPUs. Basically they were bad on Windows and are slowly improving, but unsure about their state on Linux. The cards were quite bad at some point, and well worse than an experience with NVIdia, despite the libre stack.
I would say the "best" depends on goals here. I generally encourage use of AMD over NVidia, but the difference is quite small. If you're already going with CachyOS, then you're well beyond the skill level to be able to navigate the tiny additional complexity of an NVidia card. Just buy the best bang for buck and your use case.
As for Mali, recent kernels and Mesa versions have made significant inroads. I do believe we'll get pretty good support for Mali by the time the Qualcomm ARM Laptops become available for Linux.