> however their GPU drivers are terrible, especially under linux.
Imo the AMD drivers are way better than Nvidia's drivers. They're included in the kernel and therefore open source. Compared to Nvidia's proprietary drivers that have horrible support with a lot of compositors and lack support for DDC/CI over DisplayPort. The Nouveau drivers are better (slower performance but better compatibility), but are unable to change the clock speed (and are set to the minimum).
The AMD drivers "just worked". Selling my RX480 for a GTX 1070 was the worst decision I made when it came to compatibility. Now I can't even get Vsync to work with this Nvidia crap.
Since Linux 4.15, AMD GPU support is in kernel, can't say the same for Nvidia.
That said, Nvidia's proprietary drivers still do better than AMD's drivers.
Well it's a good thing nvidia is catching up on being horrible. The 367.xx driver's dkms module doesn't even compile for me on Ubuntu 16.04 anymore, and later drivers make some gstreamer-based apps stutter a bit.
And Windows is behaving weirdly as well since I installed the latest drivers. Black bar on top of full screen programs after waking from hibernation, The HD audio driver not letting pulseaudio start (I need it to get sound from WSL) and crashes when multiple 3D accelerated VMs are open. And restarting the GPU driver (with either the shortcut or through device manager) is what solves all the issues and they only occur with the latest driver.
And the crappiest part is that there's nobody that can help. Getting someone from nvidia to respond on their forums is basically luck, and I'm not a huge company that can get their reps to get someone to help me.
The open source drivers of slightly old GPUs are ok. Not that good, but not bad either. And they are open, so they will come well integrated with your distro.
What puts AMD GPUs in a weird situation where you can expect them not to work very well when they are new, but to improve until you can forget about them. (The inverse of the NVidia GPUs, that work ok when new, but slowly loses compatibility with time.)