Radeon RX 5600 XT With New vBIOS Offering Better Linux Performance Following Fix

[ResponseWriter]

Any 1440p or 2160p Linux benchmarks available?

[bridgman]

Does the SMC firmware contains vBIOS, or it has to be flashed separately?

It's separate from VBIOS - the SMC firmware goes into the initramdisk so the driver can load it, while the VBIOS is flashed into EEPROM.

[chithanh]

In my opinion, 12 GB is too much today as far as gaming is concerned

I think you can never have too much. The extra VRAM isn't going to be detrimental in any way.

and it isn't going to be required until PS5 and Xbox Series X are released which are expected to have at least 12 GB of GDDR6.

I think it will not be required then either. You can still get along with 4 GB VRAM at the end of this console generation, just don't max out the settings that impact VRAM usage.

Because you mentioned 6 GB (which I didn't expect): Do you mean that those reviewers reached the limits of VRAM bandwidth or VRAM capacity? 192-bit vs 256-bit is about bandwidth, not about capacity.

Yes, they tested games which are known heavy on VRAM use and were able to provoke situations where it ran full and frametimes became uneven.

[chithanh]

Extra VRAM can increase:

• PCB complexity
• Power consumption
• Temperature
• Cost
• Access latency

Except for cost, not really. The cards would just use double capacity chips like they do on the 5500 XT 4 GB vs 8 GB.

[chithanh]

You moved to talking about 4&8 GB GPUs, while the discussion was about 12+ GB.

No. I talked about what would change if the 5600 XT were to get a 12 GB variant. And that would likely just be double capacity memory chips, like in the 5500 XT 4/8 GB.

It would be helpful if you could find out how the power consumption of Samsung's K4Z80325BC-HC14 (256M x 32) compares to the power consumption of K4ZAF325BM-HC14 (512M x 32).

I thought it was common knowledge that the number of DRAM chips, not their capacity, is what is mainly driving power consumption.

[chithanh]

So pretty insignificant. Even if we very generously assume +0.5 W per GDDR6 component, that is +3 W for the entire card.

Numbers that I have come across are ~2.5 W per GDDR6 component, independent of capacity. And it makes sense when you think of it, most of the power consumption happens in the physical interface, not in the DRAM cells. This is also what makes HBM much more energy efficient than GDDR5/5X/6.

I don't understand. Do you mean that today on all 5600 XT PCBs there already is the extra wire which is needed to address 12 GB of memory?

Not sure what wire you are talking about. Care to point it out on the GDDR6 pinout?

[JanW]

Whow, that's a 44% increase in average power consumption for a 5% increase in performance with the new vBIOS. Looks like something is not quite optimized yet.

[JohnSheridan]

I'm looking for information on how to make the 5600 card work on Linux.
The latest driver pack released by AMD is version 19.50 which adds support for RX 5500. The kernel would also require some modifications.
At moment, running more than a basic console on this card should be simply impossible.
How can you not only run X but even test games..???
Infos on how to make those games run on Linux would also be appreciated...
Thanks for your answer!

[bridgman]

The next packaged driver release including 5600XT support should be available in a week or so.

In the meantime, as long as your board does not have the updated VBIOS (which is likely but not definite) then any distro with good Navi10 support should work IIRC.

Which distro/version are you running ?

[JohnSheridan]

Which distro/version are you running ?

I'm running Debian 10 Buster (stable) 64 bit. It may be a bit too "conservative" as of package versions, but i can change to another distro if it's a problem.

Thankyou