A new AMD vs Nvidia decision?

Just wait and see how good those drivers are first.

AMD given nvidia having a better performance to cost ratio

When the fuck?

and the fact that they have the potential for HDMI2.1 support which AMD doesn't have a solution to yet.

An open source solution exists for Intel, the way it works is just by a translation layer between HDMI & DisplayPort. I imagine AMD will do the same thing.

Why even use HDMI when AMD does DisplayPort 2.0 where nvidia only does 1.4?

I'd say nvidia would work fine but you need to take into account that the drivers can be a bit flakey.

given nvidia having a better performance to cost ratio,

In what part of the world? I haven't found that to be true.

the power usage (big one for a compact living room system),

You might want to do some more homework in this area. I recall AMD having better performance/watt in the tests I read before buying, but it's hard to declare a clear-cut winner, because it depends on the workloads you use and the specific cards you compare. AMD and Nvidia don't have exactly equivalent models, so there's going to be some mismatch in any comparison. In stock configurations, I think both brands were roughly in the same ballpark.

Departing from stock, some AMD users have been undervolting their cards, yielding significant power savings in exchange for slight performance loss. Since you're planning a compact living room system, you might want to consider this. (I don't know if Nvidia cards can do this at all, or whether their drivers allow it.)

Regardless of brand, you can also limit your frame rate to reduce power draw. I have saved 30-90 watts by doing this in various games. Not all of them benefit much from letting the GPU run as fast as it can.

and the fact that they have the potential for HDMI2.1 support which AMD doesn’t have a solution to yet.

AMD cards do support HDMI 2.1. Did you mean Fixed Rate Link features, like variable refresh rate, or uncompressed 4K@120Hz? You're not going to get that natively with any open-source GPU driver, because the HDMI Forum refuses to allow it. Most people with VRR computer displays use DisplayPort, which doesn't have that problem (and is better than HDMI in nearly every other way as well). If you really need those FRL features on a TV, I have read that a good DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter will deliver them.

Another thing to consider: How much VRAM is on the AMD card vs. the Nvidia card you're considering? I've found that even if a card with less VRAM does fine with most games when it's released, it can become a painful constraint over time, leading to the cost (and waste) of an early upgrade even if the GPU itself is still fast enough for the next generation of games.

I switched from Nvidia to AMD, and have not been sorry.

If you want a more open platform, that works better on Linux and has better value, go AMD

I switched from a 3000 series Nvidia to a 7000 series amd and couldn't be happier.

And yeah, dead wrong on price. I paid half the price for my AMD compared to my old Nvidia

AMD no doubt. Back in 2017 AMD had recently open sourced their drivers I was in the market for a GPU, but you know the saying "fool me once shame on you", AMD used to SUCK on Linux, people always seem to forget about it, so I chose an Nvidia. I don't regret my choice, but over the years AMD proved that it had really changed, so my new GPU now is an AMD, and the experience is just so much better.

Today it might be a turning point, maybe Nvidia will change, maybe they'll change their mind and fuck It up, they've done it in the past, so I wouldn't buy an Nvidia just in case they do the right thing for once, AMD is already doing the right thing for years. Also if you go with Nvidia forget about Wayland, and every day more and more distros are going Wayland only, so if you go Nvidia you might find yourself holding a very expensive paperweight in a few years.

Ethically I prefer AMD. Heck, I would sooner buy an Intel GPU than nVidia.

I would keep in mind one thing with Nvidia. Their consumer GPU market is a drop in the bucket compared to their server, cloud and AI/ML markets. AMD dedicates real effort and resources to their hardware development and they don't lock their features to their own platform. I'm still using a vega56 and haven't really felt a need to upgrade because things like fsr just keep my card chugging along.

It quite simply depends on which GPUs you're looking at. Since you already have a 3070 (which works fine on modern games), I can only imagine you're looking at the highest end GPUs available right now?

I have a 3090 and just swapped over to the beta 555 drivers and Kwin with explicit sync patches applied (the patches will be available out of the box with Kwin 6.1). Honestly, the Wayland experience is basically flawless now for most cases. The only bug I am experiencing is Steam shows some corruption in the web views on start up until I resize the window, but it's a minor quibble in exchange for getting Wayland. I expect most of the minor remaining issues to be hammered out quickly.

Honestly, I've had genuinely bad experiences with AMD. I hated my unstable Vega 64 that would crash almost every day and was much happier when I finally ditched that card for my 3090. My laptop has a Radeon 680M and that would regularly have hard system hangs, broken video acceleration, etc.

Besides that, I also think being part of the AMD ecosystem is difficult at times. FSR sucks compared to DLSS, raytracing is sub-par, there's no path reconstruction equivalent. From a compute perspective, ROCm is unstable. Even running something as simple as Darktable with ROCm would cause half of each of my photos to not render out properly. Blender with Optix is much faster than Blender with AMD HIP. If you want to do AI, forget AMD as the ecosystem has basically gone with CUDA.

And yeah, the lack of HDMI 2.1 means no 4k 120Hz VRR on a wide variety of displays. Everyone says "why not display port", but it is tough finding a DP capable monitor with the right specs and size sometimes. For example, try finding an equivalent of an LG C2 that has DP. There's only one, its by Asus, and it costs $600 bucks more.