Ok, first thing, before you all tell me to “USE THE SEARCH!” I did, and the most relevant thread I could find was two years old. Stuff changes in two years. I’m on your side, trust me.
Looking to start fresh with a new build and give linux a go for a gaming machine.
For drivers, general compatibility and support, is there a clear winner between AMD and Nvidia for GPUs and/or CPUs?
Any specific hardware to recommend or stay away from?
For AMD the Gnu Linux community got a very customizable and performant open source mesa driver. that usually works with new upstream kernels straight away. Mesa radv’s flexibility is especially useful when it comes to make new triple A games run on linux shortly after their release, because linux community devs around the world have direct acces to the drivers and can contribute code changes to debug and improve it. Also AMD drivers run better with modern linux standards like wayland. In case something doesn’t work, you got the choice of three linux drivers as an alternative.
As for a beginner friendly gaming distros i recommend nobara, based on fedora. If you are more advanced then i recommend arch.