well, today i (partially) realized why my basic drivers don’t work: the preinstalled packages amdgpu and amdgpu-dkms seem to not work due to amdgpu-dkms being unconfigured. tried configuring it and got the same error. around about there my system stopped using even the iGPU and i had to uninstall some other drivers (thanks @[email protected] )
As a relative Linux noob and Nvidia card owner, I keep hearing how it’ll be so much easier if I go AMD. Is that not true?
It is. OP is just using an old-ass card from many years ago.
It is true and has been my experience for the last decade or so. Unfortunately, OP is trying to use a GPU from 2015 that’s still based on GCN 1.0 with the newer amdgpu driver stack, which is not officially supported. Effectively, OP is getting a taste of what it was like before AMD started pouring ressources into their open source GPU drivers.
AMD is much MUCH better to set up, I have an AMD laptop and setup for drivers is just adding amdgpu to the boot flags (NixOS btw), for Nvidia on my main pc I had to go to hell and back to get it mostly working and even then Zed sometimes causes my kernel to panic (But I’m not 100% sure if it’s because of the Nvidia drivers)
You typically only have issues if you want to use a newly released card with a distro that doesn’t run a recent kernel or if you want to use GPU compute.
Can confirm:
When I bought an RX Vega 56 on launch day seven years ago and installed it the same day, I had to go with the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver (on Kubuntu) because the Free drivers didn’t support it yet.
When I bought an RX 9070 XT on launch day two months ago but took a few weeks to install it (because it was wider than my old Vega I had to get a different case, which I spent a little while deciding on), I had to upgrade to the actual latest mainline kernel instead of the one Kubuntu shipped with, but then it “just worked” without any proprietary drivers. (The same would’ve been true had I installed it immediately on launch day as 6.13.5, which added support for it, came out before the card was released.)
Of course, it suddenly occurs to me upon reading this thread that I haven’t tried the new card out with GPGPU or LLM-type stuff yet, and since I’m not using the proprietary driver this time I guess I still need to install ROCm. Oops, LOL.
I’d recommend using OCI containers (docker/podman) there. I was even able to get models working with ROCm on my 780m iGPU that’s not officially supported.
Yeah, I think I just got unlucky with the drivers.
No AMD is fine. You pretty much never need to install anything to get full performance from it, not sure what OP is up to maybe ROCm which is like, AI-related stuff. Not something most people need.
Generally yes, if you use any modern card. Older ones might require to switch to an older driver (before “amdgpu” there was one called “radeon”, by default any distro I know comes with the modern amdgpu). There are also two AMD GPU generations (I think HD7000/Rx 200 and Rx 300) that can be a little bit nasty as the driver change happened around that time, those sometimes need manual intervention.
Anything newer (RX 550 and higher) pretty much always work without any hitch or additional steps required.
AMD used to be a huge pain in the ass to get working, but that hasn’t been true for a while now.
I can guarantee you’ll get more bang for your buck going with Nvidia just due to the fact that so much compute software requires cuda (blender, machine learning, any sort of engineering simulation software). Nvidia drivers are just less of a pain to deal with as a developer, since they’re less strict on error handling and syntax.
You can get a 3050 on amazon for like $150 now, which is more than enough for most games.
Plus DLSS is still miles ahead of FSR in terms of quality and efficiency.
Interesting! Well I currently have a 1070ti, which the internet tells me will mostly outperform a 3050. Thanks for your dev perspective.
The 1070Ti doesn’t have the hardware necessary for DLSS, which makes a huge difference in performance for gaming.
Also I was using the 3050 as a low-cost example (it’s what I use). My roommate uses a 3060Ti and that thing easily handles every game she’s thrown at it.
Good stuff to know. Thx!
Ive had no issues, nvidias just better when it comes to actual software support, like for blender, amd works mostly fine for me on cachyos, hip rt crashes blender tho. All of my steam games run fine. I did have to reinstall my os after messing stuff up setting up qemu, attaching my gpu as a device did not go correctly and when I removed qemu through the terminal (black screen) it stayed stuck on my integrated gpu and couldn’t recognize the seperate one anymoere. Only issue ive really had, wont try to set up a windows virtual desktop again.
Lol no.
realtime vfx in houdini and embergen?
For 3d rendering? Vr gaming? Its far superior?
Most local AI apps have cuda support for local GPU, only a few have rocm
Oh, that way around. Yeah, more software is using Nvidia CUDA although you can run increasingly more stuff via ZLUDA. Also more and more software comes around supporting ROCm or just uses a vulkan layer. In the end the biggest struggle is to install either CUDA or ROCm drivers, both can be lretty annoying to install depending on your distro. For local AI apps just use the ones supporting ROCm. Haven’t gotten into trouble there so far.