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Anyone willing to comment on their experience of AMD Linux GPU drivers? Are they good/bad/meh?

pfych 3y ago
I've only ever had one issue related to power delivery while running VR a few years ago. Would not provide enough juice to the GPU and would cause artefacts in the rendering. Other than that though I've had no major issues running relatively modern games over the last 2-3 years with my 5700xt.
blibble 3y ago
my use has been perfect in tree, no nvidia bullshit just works
SXX 3y ago
This depends on your use cases. If you running stable distribution like Ubuntu LTS and use Blender (or any professional 3D software) Nvidia proprietary driver is still make sense to use. Also Nvidia is obviously your choice if you want to run any machine learning software. But if you want to run some bleeding edge distribution and play games on Linux then AMD open source driver will work great for you.
nickserv 3y ago
Really good for my gaming rig / general use. Mainly older games with good Wine support. Some light graphics: Krita, OBS, Gimp... With Wine-staging and Mesa / Vulkan stable PPA's, everything has been solid with good performance. No sweating during kernel updates ;-)
lmm 3y ago
They're bad, unless you get lucky; on paper they have all the features you'd ever want, but in practice they're just flaky. Too many random crashes.
l0b0 3y ago
Intel >> AMD >> Nvidia for GPU driver stability and Linux compatibility (source: used all three on different machines for everything including gaming). Of course, if you require some specific GPU feature or amount of RAM, that probably overrides most stability concerns.
nwallin 3y ago
They're great if you have a recent (<10 years old, starting with the Radeon HD 7000 series, released in 2012.) video card which are supported by the AMDGPU drivers. Rock stable and good performance. If you have a 10-15 GPU, which are supported by the older, but still open source, radeon drivers they're meh. They're stable but the performance is very poor. (they also lack vulkan support and I think you're limited to opengl 3.x but that's as much because of the hardware as the lack of driver support) (when I say the "performance is poor" I don't just mean that it's 10+ year old hardware and Moore's law has passed it by. I mean the drivers were poorly optimized, and the chipset itself spent a lot of time idle/doing redundant work, even when the graphics card was the bottleneck. The same card playing the same game in Windows would get higher framerates because the Windows drivers were better optimized.) If you have a 15+year old GPU supported by the fglrx drivers they are (were) bad. Extremely flakey, crashed all the time. AFAIK AMD has long since abandoned them, and if you have a driver that requires the fglrx drivers, you're probably out of luck. For all intents and purposes these cards are expensive, power hungry VESA cards.
BeefWellington 3y ago
Just works. Excellent performance. At least for my RX6800, it's been smooth sailing in all kinds of gaming. The only issue, which has started to disappear thanks to the Steam Deck, was certain Anti-Cheat software, which prevented competitive multiplayer in certain titles.

I've only ever had one issue related to power delivery while running VR a few years ago. Would not provide enough juice to the GPU and would cause artefacts in the rendering. Other than that though I've had no major issues running relatively modern games over the last 2-3 years with my 5700xt.

blibble 3y ago

my use has been perfect in tree, no nvidia bullshit just works

SXX 3y ago

This depends on your use cases. If you running stable distribution like Ubuntu LTS and use Blender (or any professional 3D software) Nvidia proprietary driver is still make sense to use. Also Nvidia is obviously your choice if you want to run any machine learning software. But if you want to run some bleeding edge distribution and play games on Linux then AMD open source driver will work great for you.

nickserv 3y ago

Really good for my gaming rig / general use. Mainly older games with good Wine support. Some light graphics: Krita, OBS, Gimp... With Wine-staging and Mesa / Vulkan stable PPA's, everything has been solid with good performance. No sweating during kernel updates ;-)

lmm 3y ago

They're bad, unless you get lucky; on paper they have all the features you'd ever want, but in practice they're just flaky. Too many random crashes.

l0b0 3y ago

Intel >> AMD >> Nvidia for GPU driver stability and Linux compatibility (source: used all three on different machines for everything including gaming). Of course, if you require some specific GPU feature or amount of RAM, that probably overrides most stability concerns.

nwallin 3y ago

They're great if you have a recent (<10 years old, starting with the Radeon HD 7000 series, released in 2012.) video card which are supported by the AMDGPU drivers. Rock stable and good performance. If you have a 10-15 GPU, which are supported by the older, but still open source, radeon drivers they're meh. They're stable but the performance is very poor. (they also lack vulkan support and I think you're limited to opengl 3.x but that's as much because of the hardware as the lack of driver support) (when I say the "performance is poor" I don't just mean that it's 10+ year old hardware and Moore's law has passed it by. I mean the drivers were poorly optimized, and the chipset itself spent a lot of time idle/doing redundant work, even when the graphics card was the bottleneck. The same card playing the same game in Windows would get higher framerates because the Windows drivers were better optimized.) If you have a 15+year old GPU supported by the fglrx drivers they are (were) bad. Extremely flakey, crashed all the time. AFAIK AMD has long since abandoned them, and if you have a driver that requires the fglrx drivers, you're probably out of luck. For all intents and purposes these cards are expensive, power hungry VESA cards.

BeefWellington 3y ago

Just works. Excellent performance. At least for my RX6800, it's been smooth sailing in all kinds of gaming. The only issue, which has started to disappear thanks to the Steam Deck, was certain Anti-Cheat software, which prevented competitive multiplayer in certain titles.