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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT Linux Support and Performance Review

88 points by rcarmo 4y ago

apatheticonion 4y ago
I love AMD's commitment to best in class GPU support for Linux. Over the last few generations of AMD GPU; I have run Windows, Linux and a MacOS Hackintosh - all with seamless hardware acceleration, relatively good power consumption/thermals and with a great fps per dollar compared with competing products. Add to it that AMD was instrumental in the creation of Vulkan, which is the graphics API that made gaming on Linux possible (and gaming on M1 MacOS easier). They created FreeSync and FSR which is open to all hardware and honestly pretty decent. I'm no hardware evangelist but I really respect AMD's consistent drive to improve the industry and it has certainly left an impression on me.
- marcyb5st 4y ago
  I agree, but the lack of usable ML acceleration is a deal breaker for me. Especially nowadays that stable diffusion and similar models can be run on your Desktop. So, this gap will not only drive hobbysts/professionals away from AMD, but normal users more and more. Last time I checked ROCM is light years away from CUDA.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I have my hopes high because of two reasons. 1. World's most powerful supercomputers run on AMD Radeon Instinct cards, which means more funding for better ML stack from AMD. 2. A ton of ROCm libraries developed by AMD has landed recently in Debian, which means there's actual and fast paced development work being done on this stack.
    - MintsJohn 4y ago
      There's been this big promise of rocm for ages, since it hasn't taken up ever since, I see no reason for it to do so shortly (it will eventually). Yes rdna3 has ml optimizations, sure there is even some non public windows rocm build, but even if everything works out, taking into account the time the leading frameworks need to either fully use rocm at all or even update a to newer version, now is not the time to get an amd gpu when you want to do ml. Given AMDs trackrecord of not delivering workable ml solutions, it only makes sense to do so when the ecosystem is there and stable for a year or so.
    - _hl_ 4y ago
      But this is all for the enterprise grade hardware. There seems to be very little interest from AMD to extend their stack to consumer GPUs. From an outside perspective I really cannot understand their reasoning here.
      - JonChesterfield 4y ago
        If you manage to build the stack from source (or your distro did) it's likely to run fine on consumer hardware. A lot of it is developed on them. I don't do ML or try to build 'real' applications though, so ymmv. And outside of the blessed rocm binaries the company line is unsupported. Kind of has to be, they weren't tested by amd. Source: I work on the llvm part of the stack and don't have enterprise hardware. I don't know what the library developers use but expect some of them have similar setups.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    I remain a fanatically committed AMD buyer for their linux support, but wow the cost of it in the machine learning space has been painful. It really hurts when all the tutorials are for Nvidia and nothing seems to work. I suspect the ROCm situation has not improved since last time I checked, based on their documentation. The installation guide [0] is a bit of a mess. It looks like they are targeting ROCm at existing ROCm users rather than finding ways to convince people to become ROCm users; nothing there is useful introductory material. The opening is basically marketing babble too. Or possibly someone with a history in the GNU projects lineage of terrible recursive names. It just doesn't look like they've got a leadership figure trying to bring people in to their ecosystem right now. I dunno, maybe the API isn't intended for interested developers. [0] https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Installation-Guide-v5.4/page/Introduction_to_ROCm_Installation_Guide_for_Linux.html https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Installation-Guide-v5.4/pag... - opens with "ROCm is a brand name for the ROCm open software platform (for software) or the ROCm open platform ecosystem (includes hardware like FPGAs or other CPU architectures)".
    - rerx 4y ago
      The tooling is there to convert existing CUDA code into a form that runs on AMD GPUs as well: https://docs.amd.com/en-US/bundle/HIPify-Reference-Guide-v5.1/page/HIPify.html https://docs.amd.com/en-US/bundle/HIPify-Reference-Guide-v5.... They have drop-in replacements for most Nvidia-specific libraries like cuDNN, too. So, while the documentation still doesn't make it trivial to get started, the software side definitely seems to have improved in recent years.
    - Cloudef 4y ago
      It's unfortunate. CUDA is a mess, but because it's the leading tech on the field, AMD has no choice but to come with an (equally messy) compatible solution. Vulkan was thought of as a something that could replace CUDA and (dead) OpenCL, but it's never going to take off due to the ML field being heavily CUDA, or well more of pytorch / python :)
      - eyegor 4y ago
        I haven't tried it myself, but pytorch has supported amd gpus via rocm since 2021. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-hub/pytorch https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-hub/pytorch
  - sorenjan 4y ago
    I hope we'll see better inference solutions soon. Instead of installing some version of pytorch and downloading .pt-files I'd like to have an inference engine optimized for my computer, and be able to download trained models that run on multiple different systems. There's already DirectML on Windows, CoreML for Apple, ONNX runtime, etc. Not everyone need to train models, and maybe some fine tuning for things like Dreambooth can even be done on CPU. I think what's holding this back is lack of interest from the academics publishing the models, which is understandable. With a better inference standard option hopefully it would run on AMD too. But I also hope AMD gets their compute to a better place, preferable using open standards so we don't need "Nvidia code", "AMD code", etc.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    Forgive me if this is a silly question, but why would a normal user need ML? I'm a techie and I don't think I have a use for it.
  - atq2119 4y ago
    Since you mention stable diffusion, there's this: https://github.com/nod-ai/SHARK/blob/main/shark/examples/shark_inference/stable_diffusion/stable_diffusion_amd.md https://github.com/nod-ai/SHARK/blob/main/shark/examples/sha... Looks like it's still early days, but clearly it has recently been made to work and there's an effort going on to make it better.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Yup, this is why I will continue to buy AMD GPUs until the open-source Nvidia drivers make their way into the kernel.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    Note for anyone reading this: it's not at all comparable to what AMD is doing. AMD driver is fully open, including userspace components, while nvidia has open sourced a (relatively) tiny kernel module, and keeps the vast majority of their code closed. https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981
    - gigatexal 4y ago
      Thank you for clarifying. I’ll likely stick with AMD then.
    - mmis1000 4y ago
      At least that make nvidia card on linux to be in the same state as nvidia card on windows. Still a giant improvement. It's good enough (for most user) that you can just install the binary user component driver and run the card without limited to random linux distro or version. Imaging you can't even do any windows update because nvidia card may have compatibility problem and turn your desktop black. It's the status that nvidia on linux now.
- betaby 4y ago
  There is no HW acceleration for AMD iGPU however. Neither VLC/mpv nor Chrome/Chromium/Firefox can use HW acceleration on Linux with AMD iGPU. Since it's a corporate laptop I can't do much. For a personal one Intel and their iGPU is the only combination capable of HW accelerated video playback.
Thev00d00 4y ago
Interesting to see these cards have a decent performance on a bunch of games under Linux with existing drivers. I suppose it shows the investment split between platforms, where Nvidia win on Windows and AMDs fully OSS strategy working out on Linux. I guess fixes for AMD based platforms like the Steam Deck help these newer cards too
formerly_proven 4y ago
Unfortunately so far these are underwhelming. Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (idle with a single monitor is also bad, but not quite as egregious). In terms of performance they're good, but the much lower efficiency (20-50 % lower) compared to NV Ada suggests to me that AMD aimed for a lower performance level and had to bump performance up on short notice. The high power draw through the slot, which GPUs generally avoid nowadays for a number of reasons, also seems to suggest this - AMD is clearly trying to get every single Watt into the card they can. Non-reference cards more or less all have three eight pin power connectors - I'd go so far as to say the two connectors on the reference cards are basically marketing to seem more efficient. Though even with European electricity prices, the generally higher (real world) power consumption of these doesn't make the (more expensive) 4080 a better deal. Maybe if prices cross over the 1 buck/kWh threshold. Never say never! The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do. That's pretty much it. The assumptions/rumors/leaks and such right now[0] point to underwhelming release drivers. Like they aren't taking advantage of the hardware, or have clutches in place until they can get higher utilization of the hardware to be stable. By CES, there'll surely be announcements of other RDNA3 cards. By the time these get reviewed, drivers should be closer to where they should be, and informed decisions much easier to make. Right now, the 20% higher priced 4080 gets you 17% better RT, while raster suffers -8%. Therefore 7900XTX is better value, just not by as much as everybody hoped. This might or might not change with newer drivers. I do not recommend buying any AMD RDNA3 nor 4000-series NVIDIA right now. Waiting to see what happens once lower-end cards enter the market is my advice. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Yeah. For the 7900 XT/XTX though it's already quite clear if you want it, you really want an AIB board and not the reference card, which seem to be marginal overall (power delivery, cooling).
Sakos 4y ago
Performance is great, but the comparisons are missing the 40x0 cards, unfortunately. Benchmarks under Windows show the XTX matching the 4080 at a lower price. I'm still quite unhappy about the $1000 MSRP for the XTX though.
- snvzz 4y ago
  NVIDIA didn't send Michael a 4080 nor 4090, unfortunately.
  - hotcoffeebear 4y ago
    This guy is making a great work.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Comparatively, it's not a bad price... generally and historically it's pretty bad and will turn off a lot of people. That said, they'll still probably sell out for the next quarter or so, as they're competitive and have been a lot of people holding off on upgrading. I know of a lot of people still running GTX 9xx/1xxx, and older RX 4xx/5xx cards.
  - bavell 4y ago
    I'm ecstatic to finally be upgrading from my 970 :) best $400 I ever spent, just wish I could have upgraded years ago... GPU market has been shit lately. Finally seems to be improving but still not great.
noelwelsh 4y ago
I don't trust AMDs drivers after my experience with a RX 6600 XT (which I chose, in part, because of it's open source drivers) on Ubuntu. I experience the following: * system crashes if I turn on my monitors at the wrong time when waking from sleep. One trigger seems to be a monitor powering on while I'm logging in. Both screens go black and I'm forced to do a hard reboot. * flickering and parts of the screen going black, which seems to be related to video playback but occurs at other time (for example, while typing this comment) I didn't have either problem with the NVIDIA card that I used previously.
- throw_me_5555 4y ago
  It is irrational, and I know it, but I had so many issues with drivers for Radeon 9550, almost 20 years ago that I am still afraid to buy another AMD card.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >almost 20 years ago Yeah, that was ATI, pre-AMD.
- shocks 4y ago
  > on Ubuntu This might be your problem - the kernel that ships with Ubuntu is often very old. My 5700XT ran like crap under Ubuntu - switching to a distro[0] with the latest kernel fixed all my problems. You can't be mad at AMD because Canonical ship an old kernel! [0] Any distro with a recent kernel will do. I picked Gentoo, but that's irrelevant.
  - scns 4y ago
    No need to switch, since you can use a kernel by https://xanmod.org https://xanmod.org
    - snvzz 4y ago
      Running a somewhat current Mesa3d should also matter. Ubuntu's stack is just prehistoric.
andrewstuart 4y ago
Good thing Nvidia is finally getting some competition. Without competition Nvidia will continue to drive prices sky high. And let's hope Intel manages to stay in the game for the same reasons. It's hard to get my head around a top end video card costing AUD$3,000. Even AUD$1,500 seems a ridiculous amount to spend on a graphics card.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Good thing Nvidia is finally getting some competition. On paper yea, but in practice it isn't really though. AMD 7900 series are cheaper than the super expensive Nvidia 4090/4080, but only because they're weaker in several categories, so you're not getting any real benefits for the same money. Less price but also less performance. If you're doing DL/ML work, then Nvidia is still the only choice for most consumers/businesses. Also, industry insiders are reporting that the AMD 7900 reference cards at MSRP are in very limited supply, with most going to the US, and that once they sell out, which they will, the ABI board partners will bring a $100 price bump to bring them closer to Nvidia. Gamers aren't getting the salvation they were hoping for this time from AMD. It's not really a competition anymore, AMD is simply joining Nvidia in the club of price-gouging consumers too.
  - Night_Thastus 4y ago
    "Several categories" is a bit hyperbole - it's raytracing. It's really just raytracing. You're getting identical rasterization performance at a lower cost. Now, that cost is still obscenely expensive and the 7900 XT (non X) is also terribly priced for the performance. So I'm not defending that. But I also don't use raytracing personally because in the current generations it just costs too much. I don't want to degrade and noise my image with DLSS/XESS/FSR/whatever just to get raytracing. So raytracing performance is low on my priorities.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >You're getting identical rasterization performance at a lower cost. Not that lower if you go beyond the MSRP which most people won't see in stock. Industry insiders are reporting ABI prices for the Radeon 7900 XTX on the shelf to be $100 higher than MSRP, while Nvidia is reportedly lowering the 4080 price by 100$ to meet them in that same $1,100 price-point. So in the end 7900XTX and 4080 are "the same performance for the same price" if you restrict yourself only to rasterization performance as your only metric and ignore the current bugs the AMD cards have and the extra ML/DL features Nvidia cards offer. They're still both $1,100 GPUs, far beyond what most gamers are willing to spend on a not-the-highest-end GPU, which makes me think they'll still not sell, as the whales are still going for the $1,600 4090 which is selling like hot cakes while the value chasing gamers are waiting for something much cheaper or buying cards one or two generations older at steeper discounts.
dagw 4y ago
How many Linux users are buying high end GPUs exclusively for gaming, as opposed to for compute or ML with gaming as a nice bonus. At least for me it doesn't really matter how fast these cards are for gaming, if I cannot also use them for work and/or my other hobbies I cannot justify buying one. I suspect I'm not alone in that. Hopefully we'll start getting relevant benchmarks for this soon
- rft 4y ago
  I can say that number is at least 1. I enjoy gaming, but I have been fully on Linux for a few years now. My PC builds always need high CPU performance, both multi threaded for compile workloads and single threaded for games, as well as good graphics performance for gaming, especially due to VR games. I am essentially the reverse of your described use case: I want high gaming performance with ML and GPGPU as a bonus. I like what I am seeing in regards to the new AMD cards vs. my current RTX 3080 for gaming performance. Especially since Nvidia has raised prices to a point I am no longer even begrudgingly willing to pay. But, as I am currently playing around a bit with stable diffusion I am more inclined to stay with CUDA for the time being. However this is a very recent change in interests, so I am not sure whether my priorities will change long term. I am also not planning an upgrade any time soon, so I will wait for new developments on all sides.
  - bavell 4y ago
    Same here, I'm planning to finally upgrade my workstation GPU this gen (I've been coasting along forever with my 970). ML/DL is just a fun side benefit, not enough for me to pay the Nvidia tax and the Linux headaches that come along with it.
    - pezezin 4y ago
      That makes us at least 3. I run Linux exclusively at home nowadays, and Steam/Proton has been a godsend for games. I don't really care for ML/DL that much, and for Linux AMD GPUs just work so much better. At work we have 20+ workstations running Nvidia on Linux, and they are such a pain in the ass. The idiots at my place don't even consider hardware-software compatibility issues before making the purchases, makes me mad.
causi 4y ago
Frankly I could wish AMD put more effort into their Windows drivers, let alone Linux. I desperately want to not give the assholes at Nvidia a single dime but AMD cards are terrible for emulation these days. Half the Xbox 360 library is unplayable in Xenia due to AMD bugs.
- TeaDude 4y ago
  Xbox 360? I remember that the stock AMD drivers on my PC ran TIC-80 at half speed until I updated them...
- Const-me 4y ago
  How do you know they are AMD bugs? Another possibility is emulator bugs, caused by the fact emulator developers were using nVidia GPUs.
  - causi 4y ago
    How do you know they are AMD bugs? I trust the word of the developers.
- Grazester 4y ago
  So you're mad at AMD because an emulator doesn't work?
- snvzz 4y ago
  What emulation? My experience has been great so far, with emulators for recent consoles.
  - causi 4y ago
    According to the Xenia discord, many games are straight-up broken on AMD cards. One example is Gears of War 2.
andrewstuart 4y ago
Anyone here got any experience with and comments on the quality of AMDs ffmpeg video libraries on Linux?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- irusensei 4y ago
  Tried Pop_OS earlier this year and their version of ffmpeg didn't had AMD AMF support. Fedora 37 also doesn't seem to include it. Nobara which is a patched version of Fedora published by Glorious Eggroll includes it: https://nobaraproject.org https://nobaraproject.org however no secure boot if you think its important.
  - dhruvdh 4y ago
    Why is there a need to switch distros? Is it not possible to compile ffmpeg with the relevant flags ourselves?
- tracker1 4y ago
  Not a lot... I tried with the RX 5700 XT I had at the time, and quality was a bit lower than RTX 2000 series' encoder at that time and both were much worse than CPU. But my interest was more in terms of content archival, so been mostly using CPU encoding. For streaming, would guess that the new 7000 series encoder is at least comparable to the RTX 3000 series.
Gareth321 4y ago
The reception has been quite poor over at reddit.com/r/Hardware. I don't understand why. These cards are excellent improvements over the previous generation. They compete well with all but the top of the line Nvidia GPU, and cost much less. There is also a reasonable expectation that performance will improve over time, as it has for all previous AMD cards. The only bugbears are some niche professional applications, ray tracing, and DLSS. I don't consider any of these to be factors in my decision to purchase one of these. I certainly don't consider them to be worth $200 + tax. My only gripe is that, despite these being better value than Nvidia, GPU prices are still creeping up. The technology future I was sold was one where technology becomes cheaper over time, not more expensive.
- Cloudef 4y ago
  The reception is mainly bad due to the pricing. The GPUs are seen as overpriced, especially 4080 and 7900 XT which are less bang for a buck than the 4090 and XTX counterparts.
- Sakos 4y ago
  It's the high price and missing features compared to nVidia. The 4080 is a terrible deal, but its RT, DLSS3, ML/compute, etc. makes it a far better option than the XTX despite costing more. The XTX really should be 200-300 cheaper. I don't know who's going to buy it at its current price when the 4080 is already selling abysmally.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    DLSS3 looks horrible. Just stick with DLSS2.
    - mmis1000 4y ago
      Hardware supportted frame generation is on AMD cards until the 5xx series. And not many people actually use them. AMD dropped them since the rdna series. And it is suddenly a hot cake now because nvidia introduced dlss3??? It's so confusing from my perspective. In my opinion. Frame generation only looks good when use with texture without too much detail, it looks shitty when use with complex(realistic) textures.

88 points by rcarmo 4y ago

I love AMD's commitment to best in class GPU support for Linux. Over the last few generations of AMD GPU; I have run Windows, Linux and a MacOS Hackintosh - all with seamless hardware acceleration, relatively good power consumption/thermals and with a great fps per dollar compared with competing products. Add to it that AMD was instrumental in the creation of Vulkan, which is the graphics API that made gaming on Linux possible (and gaming on M1 MacOS easier). They created FreeSync and FSR which is open to all hardware and honestly pretty decent. I'm no hardware evangelist but I really respect AMD's consistent drive to improve the industry and it has certainly left an impression on me.

marcyb5st 4y ago
I agree, but the lack of usable ML acceleration is a deal breaker for me. Especially nowadays that stable diffusion and similar models can be run on your Desktop. So, this gap will not only drive hobbysts/professionals away from AMD, but normal users more and more. Last time I checked ROCM is light years away from CUDA.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I have my hopes high because of two reasons. 1. World's most powerful supercomputers run on AMD Radeon Instinct cards, which means more funding for better ML stack from AMD. 2. A ton of ROCm libraries developed by AMD has landed recently in Debian, which means there's actual and fast paced development work being done on this stack.
  - MintsJohn 4y ago
    There's been this big promise of rocm for ages, since it hasn't taken up ever since, I see no reason for it to do so shortly (it will eventually). Yes rdna3 has ml optimizations, sure there is even some non public windows rocm build, but even if everything works out, taking into account the time the leading frameworks need to either fully use rocm at all or even update a to newer version, now is not the time to get an amd gpu when you want to do ml. Given AMDs trackrecord of not delivering workable ml solutions, it only makes sense to do so when the ecosystem is there and stable for a year or so.
  - _hl_ 4y ago
    But this is all for the enterprise grade hardware. There seems to be very little interest from AMD to extend their stack to consumer GPUs. From an outside perspective I really cannot understand their reasoning here.
    - JonChesterfield 4y ago
      If you manage to build the stack from source (or your distro did) it's likely to run fine on consumer hardware. A lot of it is developed on them. I don't do ML or try to build 'real' applications though, so ymmv. And outside of the blessed rocm binaries the company line is unsupported. Kind of has to be, they weren't tested by amd. Source: I work on the llvm part of the stack and don't have enterprise hardware. I don't know what the library developers use but expect some of them have similar setups.
- roenxi 4y ago
  I remain a fanatically committed AMD buyer for their linux support, but wow the cost of it in the machine learning space has been painful. It really hurts when all the tutorials are for Nvidia and nothing seems to work. I suspect the ROCm situation has not improved since last time I checked, based on their documentation. The installation guide [0] is a bit of a mess. It looks like they are targeting ROCm at existing ROCm users rather than finding ways to convince people to become ROCm users; nothing there is useful introductory material. The opening is basically marketing babble too. Or possibly someone with a history in the GNU projects lineage of terrible recursive names. It just doesn't look like they've got a leadership figure trying to bring people in to their ecosystem right now. I dunno, maybe the API isn't intended for interested developers. [0] https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Installation-Guide-v5.4/page/Introduction_to_ROCm_Installation_Guide_for_Linux.html https://docs.amd.com/bundle/ROCm-Installation-Guide-v5.4/pag... - opens with "ROCm is a brand name for the ROCm open software platform (for software) or the ROCm open platform ecosystem (includes hardware like FPGAs or other CPU architectures)".
  - rerx 4y ago
    The tooling is there to convert existing CUDA code into a form that runs on AMD GPUs as well: https://docs.amd.com/en-US/bundle/HIPify-Reference-Guide-v5.1/page/HIPify.html https://docs.amd.com/en-US/bundle/HIPify-Reference-Guide-v5.... They have drop-in replacements for most Nvidia-specific libraries like cuDNN, too. So, while the documentation still doesn't make it trivial to get started, the software side definitely seems to have improved in recent years.
  - Cloudef 4y ago
    It's unfortunate. CUDA is a mess, but because it's the leading tech on the field, AMD has no choice but to come with an (equally messy) compatible solution. Vulkan was thought of as a something that could replace CUDA and (dead) OpenCL, but it's never going to take off due to the ML field being heavily CUDA, or well more of pytorch / python :)
    - eyegor 4y ago
      I haven't tried it myself, but pytorch has supported amd gpus via rocm since 2021. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-hub/pytorch https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-hub/pytorch
- sorenjan 4y ago
  I hope we'll see better inference solutions soon. Instead of installing some version of pytorch and downloading .pt-files I'd like to have an inference engine optimized for my computer, and be able to download trained models that run on multiple different systems. There's already DirectML on Windows, CoreML for Apple, ONNX runtime, etc. Not everyone need to train models, and maybe some fine tuning for things like Dreambooth can even be done on CPU. I think what's holding this back is lack of interest from the academics publishing the models, which is understandable. With a better inference standard option hopefully it would run on AMD too. But I also hope AMD gets their compute to a better place, preferable using open standards so we don't need "Nvidia code", "AMD code", etc.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  Forgive me if this is a silly question, but why would a normal user need ML? I'm a techie and I don't think I have a use for it.
- atq2119 4y ago
  Since you mention stable diffusion, there's this: https://github.com/nod-ai/SHARK/blob/main/shark/examples/shark_inference/stable_diffusion/stable_diffusion_amd.md https://github.com/nod-ai/SHARK/blob/main/shark/examples/sha... Looks like it's still early days, but clearly it has recently been made to work and there's an effort going on to make it better.
gigatexal 4y ago
Yup, this is why I will continue to buy AMD GPUs until the open-source Nvidia drivers make their way into the kernel.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  Note for anyone reading this: it's not at all comparable to what AMD is doing. AMD driver is fully open, including userspace components, while nvidia has open sourced a (relatively) tiny kernel module, and keeps the vast majority of their code closed. https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://lwn.net/Articles/894861/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31344981
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Thank you for clarifying. I’ll likely stick with AMD then.
  - mmis1000 4y ago
    At least that make nvidia card on linux to be in the same state as nvidia card on windows. Still a giant improvement. It's good enough (for most user) that you can just install the binary user component driver and run the card without limited to random linux distro or version. Imaging you can't even do any windows update because nvidia card may have compatibility problem and turn your desktop black. It's the status that nvidia on linux now.
betaby 4y ago
There is no HW acceleration for AMD iGPU however. Neither VLC/mpv nor Chrome/Chromium/Firefox can use HW acceleration on Linux with AMD iGPU. Since it's a corporate laptop I can't do much. For a personal one Intel and their iGPU is the only combination capable of HW accelerated video playback.

Thev00d00 4y ago

Interesting to see these cards have a decent performance on a bunch of games under Linux with existing drivers. I suppose it shows the investment split between platforms, where Nvidia win on Windows and AMDs fully OSS strategy working out on Linux. I guess fixes for AMD based platforms like the Steam Deck help these newer cards too

formerly_proven 4y ago

Unfortunately so far these are underwhelming. Hope AMD figures out a fix for the very high idle (>100 W) consumption when more than one monitor is connected (idle with a single monitor is also bad, but not quite as egregious). In terms of performance they're good, but the much lower efficiency (20-50 % lower) compared to NV Ada suggests to me that AMD aimed for a lower performance level and had to bump performance up on short notice. The high power draw through the slot, which GPUs generally avoid nowadays for a number of reasons, also seems to suggest this - AMD is clearly trying to get every single Watt into the card they can. Non-reference cards more or less all have three eight pin power connectors - I'd go so far as to say the two connectors on the reference cards are basically marketing to seem more efficient. Though even with European electricity prices, the generally higher (real world) power consumption of these doesn't make the (more expensive) 4080 a better deal. Maybe if prices cross over the 1 buck/kWh threshold. Never say never! The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do.

snvzz 4y ago
>The smart move is to wait a couple months and see if AMD can fix the bigger issues with these cards through drivers and only buy one of these if they do. That's pretty much it. The assumptions/rumors/leaks and such right now[0] point to underwhelming release drivers. Like they aren't taking advantage of the hardware, or have clutches in place until they can get higher utilization of the hardware to be stable. By CES, there'll surely be announcements of other RDNA3 cards. By the time these get reviewed, drivers should be closer to where they should be, and informed decisions much easier to make. Right now, the 20% higher priced 4080 gets you 17% better RT, while raster suffers -8%. Therefore 7900XTX is better value, just not by as much as everybody hoped. This might or might not change with newer drivers. I do not recommend buying any AMD RDNA3 nor 4000-series NVIDIA right now. Waiting to see what happens once lower-end cards enter the market is my advice. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351H7F0QoKE
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Yeah. For the 7900 XT/XTX though it's already quite clear if you want it, you really want an AIB board and not the reference card, which seem to be marginal overall (power delivery, cooling).

Sakos 4y ago

Performance is great, but the comparisons are missing the 40x0 cards, unfortunately. Benchmarks under Windows show the XTX matching the 4080 at a lower price. I'm still quite unhappy about the $1000 MSRP for the XTX though.

snvzz 4y ago
NVIDIA didn't send Michael a 4080 nor 4090, unfortunately.
- hotcoffeebear 4y ago
  This guy is making a great work.
tracker1 4y ago
Comparatively, it's not a bad price... generally and historically it's pretty bad and will turn off a lot of people. That said, they'll still probably sell out for the next quarter or so, as they're competitive and have been a lot of people holding off on upgrading. I know of a lot of people still running GTX 9xx/1xxx, and older RX 4xx/5xx cards.
- bavell 4y ago
  I'm ecstatic to finally be upgrading from my 970 :) best $400 I ever spent, just wish I could have upgraded years ago... GPU market has been shit lately. Finally seems to be improving but still not great.

noelwelsh 4y ago

I don't trust AMDs drivers after my experience with a RX 6600 XT (which I chose, in part, because of it's open source drivers) on Ubuntu. I experience the following: * system crashes if I turn on my monitors at the wrong time when waking from sleep. One trigger seems to be a monitor powering on while I'm logging in. Both screens go black and I'm forced to do a hard reboot. * flickering and parts of the screen going black, which seems to be related to video playback but occurs at other time (for example, while typing this comment) I didn't have either problem with the NVIDIA card that I used previously.

throw_me_5555 4y ago
It is irrational, and I know it, but I had so many issues with drivers for Radeon 9550, almost 20 years ago that I am still afraid to buy another AMD card.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >almost 20 years ago Yeah, that was ATI, pre-AMD.
shocks 4y ago
> on Ubuntu This might be your problem - the kernel that ships with Ubuntu is often very old. My 5700XT ran like crap under Ubuntu - switching to a distro[0] with the latest kernel fixed all my problems. You can't be mad at AMD because Canonical ship an old kernel! [0] Any distro with a recent kernel will do. I picked Gentoo, but that's irrelevant.
- scns 4y ago
  No need to switch, since you can use a kernel by https://xanmod.org https://xanmod.org
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Running a somewhat current Mesa3d should also matter. Ubuntu's stack is just prehistoric.

andrewstuart 4y ago

Good thing Nvidia is finally getting some competition. Without competition Nvidia will continue to drive prices sky high. And let's hope Intel manages to stay in the game for the same reasons. It's hard to get my head around a top end video card costing AUD$3,000. Even AUD$1,500 seems a ridiculous amount to spend on a graphics card.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Good thing Nvidia is finally getting some competition. On paper yea, but in practice it isn't really though. AMD 7900 series are cheaper than the super expensive Nvidia 4090/4080, but only because they're weaker in several categories, so you're not getting any real benefits for the same money. Less price but also less performance. If you're doing DL/ML work, then Nvidia is still the only choice for most consumers/businesses. Also, industry insiders are reporting that the AMD 7900 reference cards at MSRP are in very limited supply, with most going to the US, and that once they sell out, which they will, the ABI board partners will bring a $100 price bump to bring them closer to Nvidia. Gamers aren't getting the salvation they were hoping for this time from AMD. It's not really a competition anymore, AMD is simply joining Nvidia in the club of price-gouging consumers too.
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  "Several categories" is a bit hyperbole - it's raytracing. It's really just raytracing. You're getting identical rasterization performance at a lower cost. Now, that cost is still obscenely expensive and the 7900 XT (non X) is also terribly priced for the performance. So I'm not defending that. But I also don't use raytracing personally because in the current generations it just costs too much. I don't want to degrade and noise my image with DLSS/XESS/FSR/whatever just to get raytracing. So raytracing performance is low on my priorities.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >You're getting identical rasterization performance at a lower cost. Not that lower if you go beyond the MSRP which most people won't see in stock. Industry insiders are reporting ABI prices for the Radeon 7900 XTX on the shelf to be $100 higher than MSRP, while Nvidia is reportedly lowering the 4080 price by 100$ to meet them in that same $1,100 price-point. So in the end 7900XTX and 4080 are "the same performance for the same price" if you restrict yourself only to rasterization performance as your only metric and ignore the current bugs the AMD cards have and the extra ML/DL features Nvidia cards offer. They're still both $1,100 GPUs, far beyond what most gamers are willing to spend on a not-the-highest-end GPU, which makes me think they'll still not sell, as the whales are still going for the $1,600 4090 which is selling like hot cakes while the value chasing gamers are waiting for something much cheaper or buying cards one or two generations older at steeper discounts.

dagw 4y ago

How many Linux users are buying high end GPUs exclusively for gaming, as opposed to for compute or ML with gaming as a nice bonus. At least for me it doesn't really matter how fast these cards are for gaming, if I cannot also use them for work and/or my other hobbies I cannot justify buying one. I suspect I'm not alone in that. Hopefully we'll start getting relevant benchmarks for this soon

rft 4y ago
I can say that number is at least 1. I enjoy gaming, but I have been fully on Linux for a few years now. My PC builds always need high CPU performance, both multi threaded for compile workloads and single threaded for games, as well as good graphics performance for gaming, especially due to VR games. I am essentially the reverse of your described use case: I want high gaming performance with ML and GPGPU as a bonus. I like what I am seeing in regards to the new AMD cards vs. my current RTX 3080 for gaming performance. Especially since Nvidia has raised prices to a point I am no longer even begrudgingly willing to pay. But, as I am currently playing around a bit with stable diffusion I am more inclined to stay with CUDA for the time being. However this is a very recent change in interests, so I am not sure whether my priorities will change long term. I am also not planning an upgrade any time soon, so I will wait for new developments on all sides.
- bavell 4y ago
  Same here, I'm planning to finally upgrade my workstation GPU this gen (I've been coasting along forever with my 970). ML/DL is just a fun side benefit, not enough for me to pay the Nvidia tax and the Linux headaches that come along with it.
  - pezezin 4y ago
    That makes us at least 3. I run Linux exclusively at home nowadays, and Steam/Proton has been a godsend for games. I don't really care for ML/DL that much, and for Linux AMD GPUs just work so much better. At work we have 20+ workstations running Nvidia on Linux, and they are such a pain in the ass. The idiots at my place don't even consider hardware-software compatibility issues before making the purchases, makes me mad.

causi 4y ago

Frankly I could wish AMD put more effort into their Windows drivers, let alone Linux. I desperately want to not give the assholes at Nvidia a single dime but AMD cards are terrible for emulation these days. Half the Xbox 360 library is unplayable in Xenia due to AMD bugs.

TeaDude 4y ago
Xbox 360? I remember that the stock AMD drivers on my PC ran TIC-80 at half speed until I updated them...
Const-me 4y ago
How do you know they are AMD bugs? Another possibility is emulator bugs, caused by the fact emulator developers were using nVidia GPUs.
- causi 4y ago
  How do you know they are AMD bugs? I trust the word of the developers.
Grazester 4y ago
So you're mad at AMD because an emulator doesn't work?
snvzz 4y ago
What emulation? My experience has been great so far, with emulators for recent consoles.
- causi 4y ago
  According to the Xenia discord, many games are straight-up broken on AMD cards. One example is Gears of War 2.

andrewstuart 4y ago

Anyone here got any experience with and comments on the quality of AMDs ffmpeg video libraries on Linux?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
irusensei 4y ago
Tried Pop_OS earlier this year and their version of ffmpeg didn't had AMD AMF support. Fedora 37 also doesn't seem to include it. Nobara which is a patched version of Fedora published by Glorious Eggroll includes it: https://nobaraproject.org https://nobaraproject.org however no secure boot if you think its important.
- dhruvdh 4y ago
  Why is there a need to switch distros? Is it not possible to compile ffmpeg with the relevant flags ourselves?
tracker1 4y ago
Not a lot... I tried with the RX 5700 XT I had at the time, and quality was a bit lower than RTX 2000 series' encoder at that time and both were much worse than CPU. But my interest was more in terms of content archival, so been mostly using CPU encoding. For streaming, would guess that the new 7000 series encoder is at least comparable to the RTX 3000 series.

Gareth321 4y ago

The reception has been quite poor over at reddit.com/r/Hardware. I don't understand why. These cards are excellent improvements over the previous generation. They compete well with all but the top of the line Nvidia GPU, and cost much less. There is also a reasonable expectation that performance will improve over time, as it has for all previous AMD cards. The only bugbears are some niche professional applications, ray tracing, and DLSS. I don't consider any of these to be factors in my decision to purchase one of these. I certainly don't consider them to be worth $200 + tax. My only gripe is that, despite these being better value than Nvidia, GPU prices are still creeping up. The technology future I was sold was one where technology becomes cheaper over time, not more expensive.

Cloudef 4y ago
The reception is mainly bad due to the pricing. The GPUs are seen as overpriced, especially 4080 and 7900 XT which are less bang for a buck than the 4090 and XTX counterparts.
Sakos 4y ago
It's the high price and missing features compared to nVidia. The 4080 is a terrible deal, but its RT, DLSS3, ML/compute, etc. makes it a far better option than the XTX despite costing more. The XTX really should be 200-300 cheaper. I don't know who's going to buy it at its current price when the 4080 is already selling abysmally.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  DLSS3 looks horrible. Just stick with DLSS2.
  - mmis1000 4y ago
    Hardware supportted frame generation is on AMD cards until the 5xx series. And not many people actually use them. AMD dropped them since the rdna series. And it is suddenly a hot cake now because nvidia introduced dlss3??? It's so confusing from my perspective. In my opinion. Frame generation only looks good when use with texture without too much detail, it looks shitty when use with complex(realistic) textures.