AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Amassing Improvements For Linux 5.8

[acowley]

The big issue with F@H IMO is that nobody has had time to get the F@H client running on HIP to use the open source ROCm stack.

Over on NixOS we can run F@H with ROCm OpenCL. It's not HIP, but it's a reproducible way to be up and folding with ROCm.

[Lanz]

Here's to hoping they get the Navi 20 support squared away so we don't have another unsupported/disastrous launch. Funny how Intel always gets it working 2-3 kernel versions before they release a new iGPU but AMD can't do the same.

[jacob]

And those drivers were good for 3D games? I remember a terrible experience with X-COM: Enemy Unknown, so I switched to Nvidia and live was suddenly good for me.

I used to have Nvidia on both desktop and laptop and absolutely hated it. Kernel upgrades would break the driver half the time, suspend/resume simply never worked, let's not even talk about Wayland support. One day I got enough, I took the Nvidia card out of my desktop PC, literally thrown it in the bin and bought an AMD one. Shortly after that I sold my laptop and bought one with Intel graphics. Never looked back.

[DanL]

I used to have Nvidia on both desktop and laptop and absolutely hated it. Kernel upgrades would break the driver half the time

"Half the time" means you and/or your distro were doing it wrong, or you're greatly exaggerating.

[blacknova]

"Half the time" means you and/or your distro were doing it wrong, or you're greatly exaggerating.

I'd vote for distro, had the same experience with nvidia driver on Fedora. And this is exactly why I don't have Fedora on laptop with nvidia gpu anymore. I think it was around Fedora 29-30 time, when almost every kernel updated have broken nvidia's driver, annoying as hell.

[CochainComplex]

I'd vote for distro, had the same experience with nvidia driver on Fedora. And this is exactly why I don't have Fedora on laptop with nvidia gpu anymore. I think it was around Fedora 29-30 time, when almost every kernel updated have broken nvidia's driver, annoying as hell.

not only on fedora. I have had this issue even under ubuntu 18.04 and now Clear Linux. SInce I do not really need my nvidia Quadro T1000 card on my work notebook I just disabled it. Once in a while new Kernels or what ever just screws the setup and I have to reinstall the driver. Enough im now running on the Intel iGPU ...it is way less painfull. It was my first Nvidia on a Laptop and will be the last. Desktop and NAS both have newer gen AMD GPU (Navi 10 and iGPU vega 3) ...less to non existing issues with Kernels 5.3+ and Mesa 20+.

btw. Wayland on intel igpu is so much smoother and snappier than NVIDIAS X11 implementation.

[Danny3]

F@H is not the right metric.
Everybody knows OpenCL is still experimental in Mesa.

Also ROCM is really painfully hard to install with all the artificially checks for the right distribution and the right kernel.
Plus the support for the current hardware (Navi) and current distributions (Ubuntu 20.04) always comes very late.
Looking at the soon to be released Ubuntu 20.04, ROCm is not even installable since it still depends on Python 2.
Very disappointing.

[Gps4l]

What? AMD had decent opensource drivers since early 2010s dude. When the GTX 970 came out, AMD drivers were good enough. Now they are very good, and during the next one-two years they will surpass Nvidia in almost everything.

It is just that people buy what brand they perceive as being quality. It doesn't matter if it really is, what matters is that they believe it is. People are morons, and that's a fact. It makes sense that most don't know how to shop. If people were intelligent Apple wouldn't exist in 2020.

Then why was it impossible to play serious sam 3 on Linux, while it was quite smooth on windows ?

I am back on AMD though, and things do have improved.

I do remember building an all amd pc though, and because of the driver state on Linux, regretting this.
Phenom II x4 , hd5750.

When steam game to Linux, nvidia had almost right away well performing drivers for Linux.
That took amd over a year longer. Pretty sure they lost allot of Linux customers because of it.

[Hibbelharry]

I used to have Nvidia on both desktop and laptop and absolutely hated it. Kernel upgrades would break the driver half the time, suspend/resume simply never worked, let's not even talk about Wayland support. One day I got enough, I took the Nvidia card out of my desktop PC, literally thrown it in the bin and bought an AMD one. Shortly after that I sold my laptop and bought one with Intel graphics. Never looked back.

I've had a thinkpad T440p at office, with hybrid intel/nvidia graphics. That was an unpleasant experience, too. Suspend wasn't reliable all the time and the nvidia chip tended to suck battery and produce unneeded heat. With some patching and tweaking nouveau was able to turn the nvidia chip off, but sometimes that damn thing just wouldn't do the trick for no reason. Installing the binary blob never made anything better...

Currently I'm using a Thinkpad T470 with intel graphics and no hybrid stuff, and that's much nicer. Even while the battery is smaller it lasts longer than my old machine did most of the time.

[amdtesterman]

It works quite stable on my Ubuntu 18.04 with a 5.3 kernel and kisak's Mesa PPA. It also works quite well on 20.04 with mainline 5.5 and 5.6 kernel - the stock 5.4 kernel on 20.04 slaughters the FPS for example in Rise of the Tomb Raider. "Quite well" means: Occasionally the boot process stalls (it eventually boots to the desktop but it can take minutes) - the reasons seems to be obtaining the display information from my two screens; powerplay also leaves traces every now and then in the syslog. When running a 5.5/5.6 kernel with the distro's mesa 20.0 on 20.04 I get heavy artifacts and after a while a crash when running War Thunder with Vulkan - this doesn't happen with kisak's mesa on the 18.04 setup. As for OpenGL: When sticking to the mesa drivers of distros and PPA there is none. ROCm doesn't support Navi and the OpenCL packages have to be pulled from the proprietary AMD drivers.
Yes, you get it working. But it has this "air of uncertainty", it's frustrating and definitely nothing an inexperienced user will be able to do. OTOH (speaking of Ubuntu): Click the checkbox for "proprietary drivers" and your NVidia card will "just work" (at least as good as it gets on Linux - which was pretty much flawless for my GTX660, GTX960 and GTX1060). Finally: An RTX2060 Super is in the very same price range as an RX5700XT - so even the hardware might be slightly in favor of NVidia. I will give Manjaro on an extra partition a try once I have migrated from 18.04 to 20.04 (I also have to work on this machine) - maybe it's less unnerving there. But It rather hardware hop than distro hop.

have you tested manjaro? its the best distro nowadays I think for newest gpu's ( amd and intel) and it is not only mesa and kernel, sometimes is the firmware too.