Current state of AMD/Radeon support

[Richard Shaw]

With the AMD graphics card drivers being open sourced I'm considering
moving away from NVidia on my next graphics card purchase but I'm concerned
because of all the driver issues I've heard about on Windows.

Are the linux drivers experiencing the same problems or are they pretty
stable?

As much as I don't like depending on the NVidia binary drivers, I have had
VERY few issues.

Thanks,
Richard

[Mauricio Tavares]

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 10:10 AM Richard Shaw  wrote:
> With the AMD graphics card drivers being open sourced I'm considering moving away from NVidia on my next graphics card purchase but I'm concerned because of all the driver issues I've heard about on Windows.
>
> Are the linux drivers experiencing the same problems or are they pretty stable?
>
> As much as I don't like depending on the NVidia binary drivers, I have had VERY few issues.

All I can tell you is I am trying to get me an AMD card to
monkey around, and that is one of the reasons.
> Thanks,
> Richard

[Germano Massullo]

I am having an AMD Radeon RX480 since ~3 years and it works very, very
good, out the box, without having to do anything. Each new Linux
kernel release increases the 3D performances. I can for example play
DOOM at ultra details on Vulkan using an old CPU a Phenom II X4 965
BE.
Concerning OpenCL, you can download the proprietary drivers,
unpackthem and run the software that needs them by adding the flag
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
so for example when I have to run darktable, I do
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/amdgpu-pro/lib64 darktable

[Felix Schwarz]

Am 09.01.20 um 16:09 schrieb Richard Shaw:
> With the AMD graphics card drivers being open sourced I'm considering moving
> away from NVidia on my next graphics card purchase but I'm concerned because
> of all the driver issues I've heard about on Windows.

I'm using AMD cards for ~8 years with Fedora now.

I experienced some issues but nothing I'd consider a major blocker (I had
similar problems with intel-based gfx cards in my laptops).

These were mostly regressions and usually there was a workaround.
- There were times when there was a chance that the kernel locked up after
  resuming from suspend (maybe 1/3 tries).
- Garbled screen after resume (old r600g driver, workaround was to switch to
  the console + back manually)
- I have one extremly old dosbox game which will hang my GPU when using AMD's
  "DC" mode with X.org. Workaround: Disable DC with kernel parameter (and
  loose HDMI audio)

I'm not using accelerated video encode/decore (as far as I know) nor OpenCL
(getting ROCm to work with Fedora is a *major* pain point).

One the plus side I always had a free driver and kernel bisections were easy.
AMD cards always worked out of the box after install (though there were times
when I used mesa.git and/or AMD kernel trees for bisection). I could use
Wayland from the first day and GPU performance seems to be ok (I'm not much of
a gamer).

Also I found that the AMD mesa developers are pretty responsive if you are
able to pinpoint a regression to a specific commit.

Felix