Also keep in mind performance will be appalling with AMD video cards on Windows, but less so on Linux...
I was thinking of upgrading GTX 980 to RX 5700 XT recently and I would have ordered the card already if i didn't run into posts like these. I am in a really big dilemma because funny enough starsector is that good of a game that I'm thinking of going for 2070 SUPER instead, but I'd rather have a dualboot with linux if that would gurantee me at least similar performance to my GTX 980. If anyone tech-savvy could confirm this for me I'd greatly appreciate it.
Alright, from my experience as the owner of a RX 5700, I can tell you that this card is absolutely NOT recommended for Starsector. The problem is that the newer AMD cards have subpar OpenGL support, and when it comes to older revisions of the OpenGL standard (like Starsector uses), support goes from subpar to literally non-existant. Seriously, an old game I have no longer benefits from any form of hardware acceleration and is now executed on the CPU...
If you have an older (4 years or so) AMD card you will probably have a much better experience, at the time AMD had not gone full-bore on Vulkan and was still paying some attention to OpenGL. However you will probably have to hunt for a specific set of drivers for the card (there's a post somewhere in these forums where an user tells the exact version of the Detonator AMD drivers that actually worked fine for the game).
And if this all sounds like the hassle it is, you can simply opt for a nVidia card and sidestep it completely...
This really explains a lot, thanks. If this is so it would explain why I haven't been having all these AMD problems with my r9 390 (5 year old card). I will definitely wait and see what new hardware is coming from AMD/Nvidia since i want to upgrade the card and Starsector is one of the main games I play.