AMD Delivers Many Fixes For Polaris GPUs On Linux - Finally Enables ZeroRPM Fan Mode

[pal666]

Nope. In the last 10 years I buy only PSU's with good reviews from Corsair or Seasonic

good psus from seasonic have warranty longer than 10 years, why do you keep buying them?

[Tumm]

If your unit is not defective, maybe your PSU is under-powered for that card, or it is defective? Many years ago, I bought a factory overclocked R9 290, to use with a 550W Corsair PSU. I got the type of problems you are describing. The thing boots and open the desktop, but any serious load will make it crash. It was resolved with a more powerful PSU (a 750W EVGA one, but the longevity of that one turned out not being as good as the 550W Corsair).

It works fine during gaming though (on both Linux and Windows). On Windows, there are no issues with fullscreen and H265 hw encode with Handbrake is stable.

[M@GOid]

Despite the praised AMD drivers on Linux, I did have multiple problems with my RX 590. Any app going fullscreen appears to cause a crash after a few seconds, and my system freezes reliably after a few seconds of high load on the H265 hw encoder.

Great that they are still working on it though. Hope they fixed these.

If your unit is not defective, maybe your PSU is under-powered for that card, or it is defective? Many years ago, I bought a factory overclocked R9 290, to use with a 550W Corsair PSU. I got the type of problems you are describing. The thing boots and open the desktop, but any serious load will make it crash. It was resolved with a more powerful PSU (a 750W EVGA one, but the longevity of that one turned out not being as good as the 550W Corsair).

[perpetually high]

Just finished compiling and testing these on the amd-staging-drm-next branch, as they did not patch cleanly on the latest 5.9 mainline kernel.
(Also big thanks to Michael for the heads up, and EQ@amd for the patches!)

I can confirm Zero RPM is working on my RX 480:



It did, however, introduce flickering issues on my multi-monitor setup (two 24" 144hz FreeSync screens) when overclocking the video card. Without overclocking, no flickering issues.

Running sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_pm_info showed VDDGFX fluctuating between 800 mV to 975 mV, and SCLK and MCLK both set to 300.

By running the following commands I was able to fix the flickering by changing the mclk value to a higher clock, and then setting it back to 300 with a fixed 975 mV. It appears 800 mV is too low of a setting for dual-monitors at 300/300.

rocm-smi --setmlevel 0 2200 1075 --autorespond y
sleep 2
rocm-smi --setmlevel 0 300 975 --autorespond y

Not sure why that works. (the "sleep 2" command was necessary; sleep 1 or omitting sleep doesn't allow the change to "settle in" if used in a startup script). Interesting to note that both rocm-smi commands above are necessary to fix the flickering. Simply setting mclk to 300 with 975 mV does not fix it. Also, if I don't use 2200 but use 600 (just something higher than 300), the flickering comes back after a few seconds. So I'm a bit stumped why this workaround fixes the flickering, but it does.

So after the above, I have no other problems with the patches.

A couple other things:

Prior to these patches coming out, --setmlevel via rocm-smi did not work in changing the mclk frequencies.

Also prior to these patches, although I was able to overclock my memory (say to 2200, stock is 2000), it was stuck on that frequency and no longer able to scale down (say to 300Mhz) which resulted in using far more power at idle or light use than I needed, as shown below:



Last thing I want to mention, using Feral GameMode's config to set a script to run at game start and game stop, I can set the mclk to 2200 (overclocked value) and 300 (powersave value) to save on power when idle and still enjoy the overclocking when gaming. Probably too much tinkering for the average user, but wanted to mention it.

[r1348]

Oh yes, my RX580 keeps delivering! Bought second-hand for less that 200€ in summer 2018 (thank you, bankrupt miners!) has been shining in my gaming rig since then. Runs very stable and smooth, and now it'll even have ZeroRPM, which is pretty much the only missing feature left...

[nranger]

Because it's there. . .

It's funny, my niece's boyfriend is crying his eyes out because she hasn't bought him an RTX 3090 and he's sure that when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out his measly RTX 2080 Super won't play it at all.

Cool story bro. Too bad it's fake. No way an RTX 2080 Super owner has a girlfriend.

Seriously though, the mining crash was at least good for budget gamers. I picked up a used Vega56 for lest than $200 pre-pandemic. Then with a re-paste, washer mod, and an undervolt, it's been cool, quiet, and a huge upgrade over my old GTX960.

I'm guessing that probably won't work well on my card. I still have an RX 480 that must have some problem. On its default fan settings, games have horrible stuttering unless I manually crank the fan up to 100% so it sounds like a leaf blower. Initially I thought the stuttering was some Linux gaming bug until I realized the problem was in Windows also, and then I discovered the fan issue. It's probably time for me to upgrade the card. But given that there aren't really any new games that interest me these days, I just haven't wanted to.

ZeroRPM sounds like a great idea though. Any graphics chip that requires a spinning fan for just regular desktop apps and video playing is clearly designed poorly.

You could try metal TIM and undervolting, they reall help. Also AIO will make a huge difference.

polaris will be around for years to come. someone getting a cheap machine together could quite easily get a polaris GPU and have a fantastic experience under Linux!

You also forget that Linus Torvalds is using a Polaris GPU in his machine, until he moves on to another GPU Polaris support is guaranteed to be alive and well.

Linus must have ranted about problems with his 580. I guess if you want it to work well, you should just switch to the same GPU that Linus uses.

[f0rmat]

I wished my cards lasted as long as yours, because no matter what I do (energy wise), hardly they work more than 3 to 4 years. I also had a R9 290 (a 6950 before that). Then I jumped into a RX470 (sold to a friend, still works), them a RX570 (ITX, died months ago). So I was more or less in the same level of performance since 2013.

I used to have problems with that with my desktop. I started using a good UPS long ago and I never had a problem again. It got to where I was retiring computers because I simply could no longer upgrade them - not because the hardware would not work. I had a home server with dual Athlon 1300s on an Asus motherboard using a 4 AGP AMD graphics card that I finally had to retire because I could no longer add hard drives to it. It lasted me for 10 years with no issues running 24/7.