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I understand how big a deal this is and want to buy an AMD card for my next PC, just to support them, but is the driver actually good? Ie, is support for AMD ca

I understand how big a deal this is and want to buy an AMD card for my next PC, just to support them, but is the driver actually good? Ie, is support for AMD cards on par with Windows? The Nvidia driver is crappy, doesn't support Optimus, etc, but at least I haven't had any problems with it for as long as I've used it.

broodbucket 6y ago
At least on par. That said, the AMD driver on Windows is notoriously crap compared to Nvidia. I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the RTX3000 series for my next GPU for the same reason.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Hmm, that's a low bar, huh. Is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Nvidia on Windows?
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    I recently bought a RX 5700 XT, and installed it on a computer that first ran Linux and then Windows 10. In Linux, the driver (including audio) seemed very robust, but I didn't find anything like a detailed control panel for the card's graphics features. On Windows, the AMD-supplied control panel has plenty of knobs and buttons, but the driver itself seems less robust, particularly w.r.t. audio-over-HDMI.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      That's very informative, thanks. I wonder if there's a cli utility on Linux instead...
      - shmerl 6y ago
        You can use radeon-profile and corectrl. https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
        ivolimmen 6y ago
        Thanks for the links; I will definitly test those out
        shmerl 6y ago
        Sure. For some reason they aren't packaged yet in common distros, so that makes them not well known.
    - RealStickman_ 6y ago
      Maybe have a look at corectrl, which aims to create a beautiful control panel for graphics cards.
  - megameter 6y ago
    The thing is, Nvidia also has issues, but their PR game is historically better. Many graphics developers have had experiences with Nvidia support where they run into a strange bug and are instructed to set a magic value to enable a driver hack. AMD drivers have had good and bad periods and hacks of their own, but are usually better behaved in this respect. But it's actually Intel that gets the most praise for adhering to spec, and therefore being a useful baseline. So user perceptions and dev perceptions diverge on what makes the drivers good, actually, and this has shifted with the different generations of APIs too; as we've gone towards a lower level access model, the basic driver functionality has become less focused on performance hacks, but there is a lot of legacy support there to support old games. We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.
  - aorth 6y ago
    What about: is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Intel on Linux? No games, just 3D acceleration for the desktop, bug-free suspend and resume, etc.
- rayhendricks 6y ago
  That is really interesting, I haven't had an AMD card for >10 years now and would really like to be rid of Nvidia due to the closed source drivers. How is suspend/resume? Thinking about canceling my pre-order queue with EVGA and getting a 6xxx card.
  - ploxiln 6y ago
    For system integration stuff like suspend/resume, display hotplug and resolution changes, etc, the open-source radeon driver is good, and probably the best option on linux. The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). However, don't expect a new Radeon GPU to be well supported on day of release, expect 1 kernel release cycle until it basically works, and one more until it has most of the bugs ironed out, and then wait until your favorite distro gets that kernel. So you're looking at 3 to 9 months depending on what distro you use. I'm personally going to be looking for people selling their RX 5700, to replace my RX 480 ...
    - shmerl 6y ago
      > The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). How is that? I think Mesa provides state of the art OpenGL and Vulkan support, especially with work on ACO. Nvidia doesn't have any edge in that anymore. They did a few years ago still, but not today.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback though if you only submit vertex commands it gets converted to VBO - and i think that was added recently-ish) whereas Nvidia's perform optimizations in background threads to convert in the best GPU format, split as necessary to minimum calls and when rendering it performs culling before processing the full list. AMD's Windows drivers also do some of that stuff (though not all). Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all. Vulkan support is most likely good though. (EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Is it really crap? I have it and it feels stable and the Crimson UI seems well made. It feels way better than the Catalyst days.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    It is crap enough for me (RX 5700 XT user) to keep a backup of the few previous successful drivers so that when one inevitably breaks things i can roll back to a previous driver. Some issues i had with a variety of AMD drivers on my current PC from the top of my head: turning on the monitor before the PC would cause the GPU to not realize there is a monitor attached, letting the monitor to go to power save mode would also cause the GPU to think the monitor was lost, settings for display scaling would be lost after every full reboot (full=real reboot, not the fast hibernate based one Win10 do most of the time, you get a full reboot after updates, some installs, etc), random full system hangs when trying to play GPU accelerated video (which is pretty much most videos on web as well as some applications like Microsoft's new XBox Games app), random reboots too, etc. So i tend to be careful with updating the drivers. Last issue i had wasn't as bad the random hangs/reboots (which fortunately hasn't happened recently) but i simply couldn't launch the crimson UI at all. I had to do a full reset and reinstall of the drivers for it to appear again. In comparison updating to the latest Nvidia driver when i had an Nvidia GPU (which was since early 2000s to ~2 years ago) was basically a non-issue: i wouldn't even think twice about it as i never had any issue. And FWIW that was the same on Linux too: i never had issues with Nvidia's drivers there either and performance was more or less the same (at least for OpenGL stuff). But note that i avoid stuff like Wayland, hybrid GPUs, etc like the plague.
    - simooooo 6y ago
      Interesting you mention this standby issue. I just moved a monitor from an nvidia setup where it had zero issues. Now when you turn the laptop (with Radeon gfx) on, it requires me to turn the monitor off and on before It is recognised.
      - ErikBjare 6y ago
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have not had a single issue on Windows with my RX560. I know AMD/ATI drivers used to be horrible on Windows back in the day, but I really think they've gotten a lot better, I'd say on par with Nvidia's.
armatav 6y ago
It is not on par at all - my 5600 got annihilated by driver issues. AMD has incredible CPUs, but just buy an Nvidia GPU - especially if you are using linux.
- commoner 6y ago
  Nvidia has subpar support for Wayland on Linux because it uses its own EGLStreams buffer API instead of the standard GBM buffer API, which is better-supported. Both AMD and Intel use GBM. Also, the open source driver for Nvidia (nouveau) has incredibly poor performance compared to Nvidia's proprietary driver, and lacks essential features such as reclocking for recent hardware generations: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html AMD's and Intel's open source drivers are their primary offerings on Linux and have good performance across all hardware generations.
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    Intel has actually gone downhill lately, especially for prior generations. I've had to live with 5 or so years of tearing with multi-monitor support on Ivy Bridge, and even single monitor tears inexplicably with some software (that shouldn't). The Intel Xorg driver is unmaintained and the generic modesetting driver doesn't work quite as well. When I first got my Ivy Bridge system, triple head mode didn't work for a while either, so it's not like they have great support when the hardware is current either. I've switched to AMD now and things are much better. Go with AMD.
    - JustCuteBullSht 6y ago
      I've found the wayland server to be a great experience with intel—the only weird bits I've seen is full-screen noise on firefox and poor support for high dpi, the latter of which is even shittier under X11. The server is really very usable nowadays. AMD's ok if you have the room for the discrete card, but I wish they would invest more in integrated on-board chips.
    - nzentzis 6y ago
shmerl 6y ago
It is good enough. I'd say overall Nvidia's driver is worse.
taurath 6y ago
I have returned 2 Radeons that I bought for specs but returned because the drivers were bad enough that I couldn’t get the same-clock performance as Nvidia or worse dealt with driver crashes and system reboots - note that this was between 10 and 20 years ago. I am highly considering trying again at eom when they announce the new cards but that it’s a Radeon is still a downside to me. Most of the Linux community has a historical hatred of Nvidia because of the driver issue so there’s a lot of relative love out in forums, but just “stable” would be a step up for me for Radeons on windows.
- morganvachon 6y ago
  I recently built a system based around a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU, and in both Windows 10 and Linux with a 5.4+ kernel it's rock solid. Gaming in Windows is simply amazing and it pairs well with my 1440p monitor. On Linux gaming is also extremely good, with only a couple of "Windows only" titles acting buggy under Proton/Steam. Considering Proton itself is in its infancy, that's to be expected. With native performance on official Linux games on par with or better than the Windows equivalent, and more and more games getting Linux ports due to Vulkan, I just about have no need to boot into Windows at home anymore apart from Fusion 360. As a workstation in Windows, since I don't overclock I don't see any stability issues. Fusion 360 is fast and fluid unlike my 8 year old Sandy Bridge dinosaur at work, even after adding a GT 1030. Good quality Crucial RAM and a no-frills AsRock B450 board make for a rock-solid build. Ditto on Linux as a workstation, everything just works and works well, and it's superb for 3D modeling and music creation (two of my main hobbies).
  - taurath 6y ago
    Good to hear that things have gotten better! Will be watching the oct 27 reveal of the new cards :)
    - pimeys 6y ago
      I'm also very interested on giving my 2080 Ti to my partner (a Windows user) and getting the fastest next gen Radeon to myself.
datalus 6y ago
AMD has caught up to Intel but still lags behind nVidia (on Windows at least). I'm just not sure they can fight a two front war. Something has to give.
- HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
  If we're talking about CPU's wrt Intel, and GPU's wrt nVidia, I think they'll do fine- IIRC, they're both separate internal groups with the same overall leader (Dr. Su).
hatsunearu 6y ago
Not sure if this is a driver problem but there's a LOT of general usability issues on AMDGPU + Linux. The default thermal control being absolute catastrophe for one.
- symlinkk 6y ago
  How is it a catastrophe? I game every day on AMD on Linux and have no issues. 99.9% of consumers don’t care about overclocking so if that’s what you’re referring to I think it’s a non-issue.
  - hatsunearu 6y ago
    It runs 75C at idle because the fan curves are wonky.
Teknoman117 6y ago
The Nvidia driver started supporting proper optimus at the begining of 2020 (can runs apps on integrated and dedicated cards simultaneously). I use it regularly on my XPS 15 (to play Kerbal Space Program). It's called "DRI PRIME". You have to set an environment variable for starting and application saying what GPU you want it to run on. I am, however, very much looking forward to the new AMD GPUs. Hopefully the RX 6000 series will be near a 3080 in more than the 3 hand picked games in their teaser. Would love to use Wayland on my desktop.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That's interesting, thanks, I tried to use Optimus on my XPS years ago but it wouldn't work. I'll try it now, thanks!
zeta0134 6y ago
I bought an AMD GPU specifically for use with my Linux workstation and haven't regretted it. Perhaps I simply had bad luck with specific nVidia cards, but the AMD driver is stable in a way the nVidia driver simply never was, especially w/ respect to GPU accelerated desktop environments and screen capture utilities. The only change I made was to switch Arch over to the LTS kernel, as the upstream kernel in Arch isn't quite as battle hardened, and did occasionally require a rollback. That's not something that's likely to affect any other distro though, it's a side effect of Arch's bleeding edge nature. Anecdotal data and all that. I'm on a Radeon VII, pretty darn solid, will probably continue to choose AMD cards in the future. Wish the Windows driver were a bit more stable, and it's... frankly weird to be saying that in comparison to the Linux driver for the same card.
- posguy 6y ago
  I have had a similar experience with my laptop that uses a Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U, it would crash once every couple days under Windows, but no such issue crops up using mainline drivers on Debian.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    Yeah, from what I understand the difference in driver stability between Nvidia and AMD on Linux is exactly the reverse of their relationship on Windows.
- encom 6y ago
  >Wish the Windows driver were a bit more stable I have an AMD 5700XT in my Windows games machine, and the driver is an absolute travesty. And looking over the installed files is a horror show. Qt5WebEngineCore.dll and avcodec-58.dll, because a browser engine and ffmpeg are essential in a device driver. And why does FacebookClient.exe exist? Fuck knows.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    It's even worse with NVIDIA - they ship an entire custom NodeJS with their drivers. Also don't forget that these are user-space apps that are simply bundled with the driver but not necessarily part of it. Qt5WebEngineCore.dll is most likely used by the UI portion of the driver (settings dialogs, radeon software etc.), same with the ffmpeg dll and the facebook client. NVIDIA does the exact same btw. - see [1] [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2020/03/13/nv-updater-nvidia-driver-updater-0-4-0-1-released-to-customize-nvidia-driver-installations/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/03/13/nv-updater-nvidia-driver-u...
djsumdog 6y ago
I remember back when AMD had both closed and open drivers and, having trouble with the proprietary drivers, I switched to the OSS version. It was NIGHT AND DAY. Games that would crash and had weird oddities now ran smooth with higher frame rates. A lot of weird video issues, especially those that come from running more than one X server or Xnest, all went away. I would only use AMD cards in my Linux boxes. The nvidia drivers/cards pale in comparison.
aero-glide 6y ago
Have you tried Nvidia on-demand option for Optimus?
jl6 6y ago
Search for “amdgpu ring gfx timeout”. There seem to be a whole class of bugs that have been open for years which not only haven’t been fixed, but there isn’t even any clear indication of what the root cause(s) is/are.
- talex5 6y ago
  I tried a couple of different AMD cards, and my machine crashes on resume if I try to use either of them (but the Intel iGPU works fine). Searching for amdgpu bug reports leads to: https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install-bugrep.html https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install-bugr... which links to a page saying "Bugzilla is no longer in use" :-( This is under Qubes/Xen, though, so maybe that causes extra problems. If any devs are reading, I did report it here in the end: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5459 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5459
- garaetjjte 6y ago
  It could be misbehaved applications. While AMDGPU and Mesa are much faster than AMD proprietary driver (on some OpenGL workloads I have seen 2x improvement compared to AMDGPU-PRO or Windows driver) and are normally stable, I had several issues where bad shaders brought down whole GPU (with "ring gfx timeout"). Things like out-of-bounds access or division by zero.
1_player 6y ago
It is not. My 5500 XT is unusable when using 2 monitors. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929 Apparently AMD doesn't have the resources to debug these millions lines of code, since this has been open for a year now. Yet people still say NVIDIA on Linux has issue. They don't support Wayland and tend to lag behind with Linux only tech in general, but the driver itself is top notch. I haven't had an nv driver crash on Linux in 10 years. It's only the same echo chamber borne by the famous moment of Linus flipping NVIDIA the bird.
- bipson 6y ago
  My experience is 180° opposite to what you describe. I never had a mentionable issue with AMD cards since switching to the open source driver approx. a decade ago. I have a NVIDIA 1060 card in my workstation for CUDA - every single time I put it in running state again, I have a realistic chance of completely borking my system. In fact I had an AMD card installed after the first two incidents, simply to have at least a chance of having working video output when the NVIDIA driver once again doesn't want to talk to the kernel. That and the whole practical implications and idealistic differences of having an (mostly) open source driver vs. a (mostly) closed source driver (I think we can agree that the open source NVIDIA driver is out of the discussion). Obviously you might run into problems if you try to run very recent hardware right after availability. Kernel driver development is not ideal for cutting edge hardware and some things might break and it might need some time for your distro to ship the newest kernel/driver.
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I upgraded from a Geforce 460GTX to a Radeon RX560, and I ran into two issues. Nothing major, and I've had worse issues with the Nvidia drivers, but they are still something to be aware of. The first was that my distro (KDE Neon based on Ubuntu 18.04) shipped an older version of Mesa at the time, which was too old for the AMDGPU driver, so I had to add a PPA with an updated version. Since Neon updated to a 20.04 base, it works straight from a clean install. It also worked with no issues when I switched to openSUSE Leap 15.2. The second was that DVI output was limited to single-link instead of dual-link. My monitor at the time only supported full 1440p through dual-link DVI or displayport, and the old GPU didn't have displayport. Buying a displayport cable was a quick fix, and I believe the DVI issue is fixed in the driver now. Aside from those two minor hurdles, it has been smooth sailing, very good OpenGL performance in the games I play.
tracker1 6y ago
Wait a few months after a new GPU comes out, maybe until the next major version cycle (like if you want a new card that comes out in November, wait until the 21.04 Ubuntu/PopOS release). I bought my RX 5700XT shortly after release, and was using alpha/beta kernel releases and downloading extra files manually for several months after to run, then an upgrade/update may turn into a blank screen on boot for me. It also broke out of the box support for running full VMs, which was pretty painful for me as well, and I wasn't going down that rabbit hole to try and build it myself. YMMV of course.. but that's just my take on it.. I bought specifically for Linux support, but took a few months to shake out.

broodbucket 6y ago

At least on par. That said, the AMD driver on Windows is notoriously crap compared to Nvidia. I'm hoping AMD's next gen turns out to be competitive with the RTX3000 series for my next GPU for the same reason.

StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, that's a low bar, huh. Is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Nvidia on Windows?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I recently bought a RX 5700 XT, and installed it on a computer that first ran Linux and then Windows 10. In Linux, the driver (including audio) seemed very robust, but I didn't find anything like a detailed control panel for the card's graphics features. On Windows, the AMD-supplied control panel has plenty of knobs and buttons, but the driver itself seems less robust, particularly w.r.t. audio-over-HDMI.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That's very informative, thanks. I wonder if there's a cli utility on Linux instead...
    - shmerl 6y ago
      You can use radeon-profile and corectrl. https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
      - ivolimmen 6y ago
        Thanks for the links; I will definitly test those out
        shmerl 6y ago
        Sure. For some reason they aren't packaged yet in common distros, so that makes them not well known.
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    Maybe have a look at corectrl, which aims to create a beautiful control panel for graphics cards.
- megameter 6y ago
  The thing is, Nvidia also has issues, but their PR game is historically better. Many graphics developers have had experiences with Nvidia support where they run into a strange bug and are instructed to set a magic value to enable a driver hack. AMD drivers have had good and bad periods and hacks of their own, but are usually better behaved in this respect. But it's actually Intel that gets the most praise for adhering to spec, and therefore being a useful baseline. So user perceptions and dev perceptions diverge on what makes the drivers good, actually, and this has shifted with the different generations of APIs too; as we've gone towards a lower level access model, the basic driver functionality has become less focused on performance hacks, but there is a lot of legacy support there to support old games. We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.
- aorth 6y ago
  What about: is AMD on Linux anywhere close to Intel on Linux? No games, just 3D acceleration for the desktop, bug-free suspend and resume, etc.
rayhendricks 6y ago
That is really interesting, I haven't had an AMD card for >10 years now and would really like to be rid of Nvidia due to the closed source drivers. How is suspend/resume? Thinking about canceling my pre-order queue with EVGA and getting a 6xxx card.
- ploxiln 6y ago
  For system integration stuff like suspend/resume, display hotplug and resolution changes, etc, the open-source radeon driver is good, and probably the best option on linux. The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). However, don't expect a new Radeon GPU to be well supported on day of release, expect 1 kernel release cycle until it basically works, and one more until it has most of the bugs ironed out, and then wait until your favorite distro gets that kernel. So you're looking at 3 to 9 months depending on what distro you use. I'm personally going to be looking for people selling their RX 5700, to replace my RX 480 ...
  - shmerl 6y ago
    > The 3D accel is not bad (but not as good as nvidia). How is that? I think Mesa provides state of the art OpenGL and Vulkan support, especially with work on ACO. Nvidia doesn't have any edge in that anymore. They did a few years ago still, but not today.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      Last time i checked (which was about a couple of months ago), Mesa had very primitive support for display lists (most of the time you get a command playback though if you only submit vertex commands it gets converted to VBO - and i think that was added recently-ish) whereas Nvidia's perform optimizations in background threads to convert in the best GPU format, split as necessary to minimum calls and when rendering it performs culling before processing the full list. AMD's Windows drivers also do some of that stuff (though not all). Mesa does implement a lot of stuff but they do not take much advantage of what the higher level parts of the API allow to optimize rendering. From what i remember until AMD pushed some devs on it, they didn't care about supporting the entire API at all. Vulkan support is most likely good though. (EDIT: yes, "display lists are deprecated", but this is irrelevant, the API is there, available and works and works great on Nvidia and still very good on AMD Windows driver and a lot of applications use it - Khronos splitting the API to core/compatibility was a mistake that made everything more complicated than necessary when what they should have done if they wanted a clean API would be to make something new like they eventually did with Vulkan and avoid messing up OpenGL )
m-p-3 6y ago
Is it really crap? I have it and it feels stable and the Crimson UI seems well made. It feels way better than the Catalyst days.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  It is crap enough for me (RX 5700 XT user) to keep a backup of the few previous successful drivers so that when one inevitably breaks things i can roll back to a previous driver. Some issues i had with a variety of AMD drivers on my current PC from the top of my head: turning on the monitor before the PC would cause the GPU to not realize there is a monitor attached, letting the monitor to go to power save mode would also cause the GPU to think the monitor was lost, settings for display scaling would be lost after every full reboot (full=real reboot, not the fast hibernate based one Win10 do most of the time, you get a full reboot after updates, some installs, etc), random full system hangs when trying to play GPU accelerated video (which is pretty much most videos on web as well as some applications like Microsoft's new XBox Games app), random reboots too, etc. So i tend to be careful with updating the drivers. Last issue i had wasn't as bad the random hangs/reboots (which fortunately hasn't happened recently) but i simply couldn't launch the crimson UI at all. I had to do a full reset and reinstall of the drivers for it to appear again. In comparison updating to the latest Nvidia driver when i had an Nvidia GPU (which was since early 2000s to ~2 years ago) was basically a non-issue: i wouldn't even think twice about it as i never had any issue. And FWIW that was the same on Linux too: i never had issues with Nvidia's drivers there either and performance was more or less the same (at least for OpenGL stuff). But note that i avoid stuff like Wayland, hybrid GPUs, etc like the plague.
  - simooooo 6y ago
    Interesting you mention this standby issue. I just moved a monitor from an nvidia setup where it had zero issues. Now when you turn the laptop (with Radeon gfx) on, it requires me to turn the monitor off and on before It is recognised.
    - ErikBjare 6y ago
KozmoNau7 6y ago
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have not had a single issue on Windows with my RX560. I know AMD/ATI drivers used to be horrible on Windows back in the day, but I really think they've gotten a lot better, I'd say on par with Nvidia's.

armatav 6y ago

It is not on par at all - my 5600 got annihilated by driver issues. AMD has incredible CPUs, but just buy an Nvidia GPU - especially if you are using linux.

commoner 6y ago
Nvidia has subpar support for Wayland on Linux because it uses its own EGLStreams buffer API instead of the standard GBM buffer API, which is better-supported. Both AMD and Intel use GBM. Also, the open source driver for Nvidia (nouveau) has incredibly poor performance compared to Nvidia's proprietary driver, and lacks essential features such as reclocking for recent hardware generations: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html AMD's and Intel's open source drivers are their primary offerings on Linux and have good performance across all hardware generations.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Intel has actually gone downhill lately, especially for prior generations. I've had to live with 5 or so years of tearing with multi-monitor support on Ivy Bridge, and even single monitor tears inexplicably with some software (that shouldn't). The Intel Xorg driver is unmaintained and the generic modesetting driver doesn't work quite as well. When I first got my Ivy Bridge system, triple head mode didn't work for a while either, so it's not like they have great support when the hardware is current either. I've switched to AMD now and things are much better. Go with AMD.
  - JustCuteBullSht 6y ago
    I've found the wayland server to be a great experience with intel—the only weird bits I've seen is full-screen noise on firefox and poor support for high dpi, the latter of which is even shittier under X11. The server is really very usable nowadays. AMD's ok if you have the room for the discrete card, but I wish they would invest more in integrated on-board chips.
  - nzentzis 6y ago

shmerl 6y ago

It is good enough. I'd say overall Nvidia's driver is worse.

taurath 6y ago

I have returned 2 Radeons that I bought for specs but returned because the drivers were bad enough that I couldn’t get the same-clock performance as Nvidia or worse dealt with driver crashes and system reboots - note that this was between 10 and 20 years ago. I am highly considering trying again at eom when they announce the new cards but that it’s a Radeon is still a downside to me. Most of the Linux community has a historical hatred of Nvidia because of the driver issue so there’s a lot of relative love out in forums, but just “stable” would be a step up for me for Radeons on windows.

morganvachon 6y ago
I recently built a system based around a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU, and in both Windows 10 and Linux with a 5.4+ kernel it's rock solid. Gaming in Windows is simply amazing and it pairs well with my 1440p monitor. On Linux gaming is also extremely good, with only a couple of "Windows only" titles acting buggy under Proton/Steam. Considering Proton itself is in its infancy, that's to be expected. With native performance on official Linux games on par with or better than the Windows equivalent, and more and more games getting Linux ports due to Vulkan, I just about have no need to boot into Windows at home anymore apart from Fusion 360. As a workstation in Windows, since I don't overclock I don't see any stability issues. Fusion 360 is fast and fluid unlike my 8 year old Sandy Bridge dinosaur at work, even after adding a GT 1030. Good quality Crucial RAM and a no-frills AsRock B450 board make for a rock-solid build. Ditto on Linux as a workstation, everything just works and works well, and it's superb for 3D modeling and music creation (two of my main hobbies).
- taurath 6y ago
  Good to hear that things have gotten better! Will be watching the oct 27 reveal of the new cards :)
  - pimeys 6y ago
    I'm also very interested on giving my 2080 Ti to my partner (a Windows user) and getting the fastest next gen Radeon to myself.

datalus 6y ago

AMD has caught up to Intel but still lags behind nVidia (on Windows at least). I'm just not sure they can fight a two front war. Something has to give.

HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
If we're talking about CPU's wrt Intel, and GPU's wrt nVidia, I think they'll do fine- IIRC, they're both separate internal groups with the same overall leader (Dr. Su).

hatsunearu 6y ago

Not sure if this is a driver problem but there's a LOT of general usability issues on AMDGPU + Linux. The default thermal control being absolute catastrophe for one.

symlinkk 6y ago
How is it a catastrophe? I game every day on AMD on Linux and have no issues. 99.9% of consumers don’t care about overclocking so if that’s what you’re referring to I think it’s a non-issue.
- hatsunearu 6y ago
  It runs 75C at idle because the fan curves are wonky.

Teknoman117 6y ago

The Nvidia driver started supporting proper optimus at the begining of 2020 (can runs apps on integrated and dedicated cards simultaneously). I use it regularly on my XPS 15 (to play Kerbal Space Program). It's called "DRI PRIME". You have to set an environment variable for starting and application saying what GPU you want it to run on. I am, however, very much looking forward to the new AMD GPUs. Hopefully the RX 6000 series will be near a 3080 in more than the 3 hand picked games in their teaser. Would love to use Wayland on my desktop.

StavrosK 6y ago
That's interesting, thanks, I tried to use Optimus on my XPS years ago but it wouldn't work. I'll try it now, thanks!

zeta0134 6y ago

I bought an AMD GPU specifically for use with my Linux workstation and haven't regretted it. Perhaps I simply had bad luck with specific nVidia cards, but the AMD driver is stable in a way the nVidia driver simply never was, especially w/ respect to GPU accelerated desktop environments and screen capture utilities. The only change I made was to switch Arch over to the LTS kernel, as the upstream kernel in Arch isn't quite as battle hardened, and did occasionally require a rollback. That's not something that's likely to affect any other distro though, it's a side effect of Arch's bleeding edge nature. Anecdotal data and all that. I'm on a Radeon VII, pretty darn solid, will probably continue to choose AMD cards in the future. Wish the Windows driver were a bit more stable, and it's... frankly weird to be saying that in comparison to the Linux driver for the same card.

posguy 6y ago
I have had a similar experience with my laptop that uses a Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U, it would crash once every couple days under Windows, but no such issue crops up using mainline drivers on Debian.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  Yeah, from what I understand the difference in driver stability between Nvidia and AMD on Linux is exactly the reverse of their relationship on Windows.
encom 6y ago
>Wish the Windows driver were a bit more stable I have an AMD 5700XT in my Windows games machine, and the driver is an absolute travesty. And looking over the installed files is a horror show. Qt5WebEngineCore.dll and avcodec-58.dll, because a browser engine and ffmpeg are essential in a device driver. And why does FacebookClient.exe exist? Fuck knows.
- qayxc 6y ago
  It's even worse with NVIDIA - they ship an entire custom NodeJS with their drivers. Also don't forget that these are user-space apps that are simply bundled with the driver but not necessarily part of it. Qt5WebEngineCore.dll is most likely used by the UI portion of the driver (settings dialogs, radeon software etc.), same with the ffmpeg dll and the facebook client. NVIDIA does the exact same btw. - see [1] [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2020/03/13/nv-updater-nvidia-driver-updater-0-4-0-1-released-to-customize-nvidia-driver-installations/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/03/13/nv-updater-nvidia-driver-u...

djsumdog 6y ago

I remember back when AMD had both closed and open drivers and, having trouble with the proprietary drivers, I switched to the OSS version. It was NIGHT AND DAY. Games that would crash and had weird oddities now ran smooth with higher frame rates. A lot of weird video issues, especially those that come from running more than one X server or Xnest, all went away. I would only use AMD cards in my Linux boxes. The nvidia drivers/cards pale in comparison.

aero-glide 6y ago

Have you tried Nvidia on-demand option for Optimus?

jl6 6y ago

Search for “amdgpu ring gfx timeout”. There seem to be a whole class of bugs that have been open for years which not only haven’t been fixed, but there isn’t even any clear indication of what the root cause(s) is/are.

talex5 6y ago
I tried a couple of different AMD cards, and my machine crashes on resume if I try to use either of them (but the Intel iGPU works fine). Searching for amdgpu bug reports leads to: https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install-bugrep.html https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install-bugr... which links to a page saying "Bugzilla is no longer in use" :-( This is under Qubes/Xen, though, so maybe that causes extra problems. If any devs are reading, I did report it here in the end: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5459 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5459
garaetjjte 6y ago
It could be misbehaved applications. While AMDGPU and Mesa are much faster than AMD proprietary driver (on some OpenGL workloads I have seen 2x improvement compared to AMDGPU-PRO or Windows driver) and are normally stable, I had several issues where bad shaders brought down whole GPU (with "ring gfx timeout"). Things like out-of-bounds access or division by zero.

1_player 6y ago

It is not. My 5500 XT is unusable when using 2 monitors. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/929 Apparently AMD doesn't have the resources to debug these millions lines of code, since this has been open for a year now. Yet people still say NVIDIA on Linux has issue. They don't support Wayland and tend to lag behind with Linux only tech in general, but the driver itself is top notch. I haven't had an nv driver crash on Linux in 10 years. It's only the same echo chamber borne by the famous moment of Linus flipping NVIDIA the bird.

bipson 6y ago
My experience is 180° opposite to what you describe. I never had a mentionable issue with AMD cards since switching to the open source driver approx. a decade ago. I have a NVIDIA 1060 card in my workstation for CUDA - every single time I put it in running state again, I have a realistic chance of completely borking my system. In fact I had an AMD card installed after the first two incidents, simply to have at least a chance of having working video output when the NVIDIA driver once again doesn't want to talk to the kernel. That and the whole practical implications and idealistic differences of having an (mostly) open source driver vs. a (mostly) closed source driver (I think we can agree that the open source NVIDIA driver is out of the discussion). Obviously you might run into problems if you try to run very recent hardware right after availability. Kernel driver development is not ideal for cutting edge hardware and some things might break and it might need some time for your distro to ship the newest kernel/driver.

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I upgraded from a Geforce 460GTX to a Radeon RX560, and I ran into two issues. Nothing major, and I've had worse issues with the Nvidia drivers, but they are still something to be aware of. The first was that my distro (KDE Neon based on Ubuntu 18.04) shipped an older version of Mesa at the time, which was too old for the AMDGPU driver, so I had to add a PPA with an updated version. Since Neon updated to a 20.04 base, it works straight from a clean install. It also worked with no issues when I switched to openSUSE Leap 15.2. The second was that DVI output was limited to single-link instead of dual-link. My monitor at the time only supported full 1440p through dual-link DVI or displayport, and the old GPU didn't have displayport. Buying a displayport cable was a quick fix, and I believe the DVI issue is fixed in the driver now. Aside from those two minor hurdles, it has been smooth sailing, very good OpenGL performance in the games I play.

tracker1 6y ago

Wait a few months after a new GPU comes out, maybe until the next major version cycle (like if you want a new card that comes out in November, wait until the 21.04 Ubuntu/PopOS release). I bought my RX 5700XT shortly after release, and was using alpha/beta kernel releases and downloading extra files manually for several months after to run, then an upgrade/update may turn into a blank screen on boot for me. It also broke out of the box support for running full VMs, which was pretty painful for me as well, and I wasn't going down that rabbit hole to try and build it myself. YMMV of course.. but that's just my take on it.. I bought specifically for Linux support, but took a few months to shake out.