How The Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi Linux Performance Has Evolved Since Launch

[CochainComplex]

Can anyone offer advice on how compatible a Sapphire RX5700XT is compared to an RX480? I'm seriously considering upgrading, but don't want to get less reliability from a newer card. For reference, I'm running on Ubuntu 18.04/Neon and an 1800x CPU. I compile my own kernels, but stick to released versions of Mesa (so currently, kernel 5.4.6 and Mesa 19.3.1). Should I upgrade, or wait a little while longer for things to mature?? TIA for any advice.

Nothing to complain - I have a ASUS Strix 5700 XT runing Kernel 5.4.6 + oibaf Mesa 20+ under PopOS 19.10

[zephyrhawk]

"is it vulkan ? If so.. have you tried RADV_PERFTEST=aco?

Yes, I tried that but I am getting about 1/10 or less of the performance I expect. Also, the native Metro titles are now suffering from long pauses. I didn't have that problem when I was on Linux Mint 19.3 using the Padoka ppa. Thanks for the suggestions all.

[aufkrawall]

I've been playing Strange Brigade lately and it performs normally here with Polaris, mesa-git and linux 5.5-rc (ACO up to 10% faster, but with very slight corruption in character faces).
RADV ACO btw. beats Windows Vulkan and DX12.

[sa666666]

Thanks for the feedback so far. I'm ready to pull the trigger, and in fact have been since September or so. But then I always hear about a little bug here and there, like the ones just mentioned, and I put it off again. I guess I will wait a little while longer. But then of course something new will be out, and the 'upgrade' won't be to the best available hardware anymore. I like AMD, and use it where-ever possible, but sometimes this long maturation of drivers is really annoying.

[Mechanix]

Improvements are nice, but it would be great if we also addressed and considered compatibility and support.

I got an RX 5700 card, after many years of nVidia use.

First it turned out to not be supported by Ubuntu 19.10 so I had to add firmware wossname. Fine, easy.
Then I got 30 fps in War Thunder as opposed to 60+ of my old GTX970. I guess it has something to do with Vulcan, but what do I know? All other games showed a nice perfomance improvement.
Then Mutant (Steam game) caused the computer to hard crash. I mean Guru Meditation, Blue Screen of Death kind of crash.
Two days later the card died. Granted, this has nothing to do with Linux and drivers, but all in all it gave me a sour taste in my mouth.

So the card was sent back and I am going for an RTX 2060 Super to replace it. Meanwile the old card will fill in.

Whatever dirt you may fling at nVidia for having non-open drivers, I can't recall a problem with them since... well, ever. And I began dorking around with Linux in 1997 so I have some history to lean on. My experience with gaming in Linux so far has been "suprisingly error-free" with a series of nVidia cards. To the detriment that I expected the same from AMD cards by anno Domini 2019, but I seem to have been wrong.

This post was brought to you by Châteauxneuf-du-Pape, so excuse the emotion.

[moilami]

Improvements are nice, but it would be great if we also addressed and considered compatibility and support.

I got an RX 5700 card, after many years of nVidia use.

First it turned out to not be supported by Ubuntu 19.10 so I had to add firmware wossname. Fine, easy.
Then I got 30 fps in War Thunder as opposed to 60+ of my old GTX970. I guess it has something to do with Vulcan, but what do I know? All other games showed a nice perfomance improvement.
Then Mutant (Steam game) caused the computer to hard crash. I mean Guru Meditation, Blue Screen of Death kind of crash.
Two days later the card died. Granted, this has nothing to do with Linux and drivers, but all in all it gave me a sour taste in my mouth.

So the card was sent back and I am going for an RTX 2060 Super to replace it. Meanwile the old card will fill in.

Whatever dirt you may fling at nVidia for having non-open drivers, I can't recall a problem with them since... well, ever. And I began dorking around with Linux in 1997 so I have some history to lean on. My experience with gaming in Linux so far has been "suprisingly error-free" with a series of nVidia cards. To the detriment that I expected the same from AMD cards by anno Domini 2019, but I seem to have been wrong.

This post was brought to you by Châteauxneuf-du-Pape, so excuse the emotion.

You aren't doing much justice now, so I have mention that 8 years ago AMD driver was not that great, but it has improved tremendously since that. For long the driver had like 60% performance of windows driver, and that was awful to watch. People raged in these forums with a reason.

All that has changed years ago and AMD is definitely the way to go now and in the future. It is with Intel chips the only plug & play video solution in Linux, AMD providing the performance Intel is lacking.

[Mechanix]

Something is not supported in War Thunder + RX5700, hence abysmal performance. It cannot merely be a matter of code quality if you get one fifth the expected performance, it must be a matter of something being missing altogether.

I have almost mostly used nVidia cards since, well, Riva TNT. And I remember a time when I had to manually enter resolution scan frequencies for CRTs in the X settings or whatever. And then somewhere early along the timeline that disappeared and graphics was not an issue anymore. Install the nVidia drivers and off you went.

Roll time forward to 2019, and Navi appears and looks good. And people like y'all speak at length about how fantastic AMD drivers are these days. Forums such as this are replete with posts how things "got better recently", usually amended with some genuflection about how open source is the only way, just like you just did there.

When you reveal a political bias like that, I can't take your arguments at face value. You are apparently partisan and would lie to me. Because AMD drivers are still crap from all I can tell after having taken a deep dive into the issue.

If you scrutinize benchmark results, you quite often find entries missing - either without explanation or at best with some footnote mumbling about problems, often with a "we have reached out to AMD about this issue".

Sometimes the notes that are post-fix. There was a problem, it was patched up during the review, there is no problem now, swear to god.

Sometimes there are subsequent reviews that pitch former ones in new light. Card X is released. It gets glowing praise. Halfyear passes. New article appears basically saying "Remember how X had issues? It has been improved recently!" Halfyear passes. New article: "X2 released, replacing shitty X". That kind of journalism betrays an intense desire to lift X by the armpits, or in other words: dishonesty.

It is possible that the open source drivers of AMD may become better than nVidias closed source drivers. As it stands now, this does not seem to be the case by far. And I feel I have been lied to by fanboys.

[Mechanix]

Is there a function for editing old posts? I see none.

[aufkrawall]

I've fired up various games on Navi recently (Hitman 2, Heroes of the Storm, Doom, Strange Brigade) and they all worked nicely with linux 5.5-rcx and mesa 20 git-master ACO.
That was not extensive testing, but it used to crash soon and often just two months ago. Not the end of the road, but good development regardless. Just a bit unfortunate that it's been taking so many months, I guess Navi was simply too many changes at once (mostly blaming the kernel driver for the crashes).

Edit: Oh, undervolting via custom SPPT and custom fan curve script work well too.

[bridgman]

Something is not supported in War Thunder + RX5700, hence abysmal performance. It cannot merely be a matter of code quality if you get one fifth the expected performance, it must be a matter of something being missing altogether.

Are you running exactly the same WT game version and configuration on 5700 as on your 970, or were you running an older version on the 970 ?

Looking through the forums there seem to have been some recent changes in the game related to EAC (which I gather is some kind of anti-cheat) which in turn forced the use of an older OpenGL back-end rather than the more performant Vulkan back-end.