AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Linux Performance

[BNieuwenhuizen]

Unavailable at all good retailers just like most decently powerful GPUs right now unless you want a crappy Nvidia GT 710.

Did you miss that today is only the NDA lift? IIRC it is only supposed to sell tomorrow?

[Volta]

Some Proton games were left out this round due to the NVIDIA driver running into issues with latest Steam Play on Hitman 2 / Strange Brigade / etc.

Impossible! The best driver blah blah blah.. It's amazing AMD is kicking ass on two fronts. Hopefully this won't make them greedy..

[Guest]

Does the GPU encoder tech on the RX 6700 XT compare to or surpass anything on NVIDIA Ampere?

With the Oculus Quest VR headsets, doing PCVR involves an encode/decode process, and uses the PC's GPU for encoding. The GPU encoder's power determine how high of an encode resolution gets sent to the headset, and thus determines overall clarity and compression. The general consensus is that AMD's encoders up until RDNA2 are notably worse compared to anything on NVIDIA (Pascal and up), and last I heard, even RDNA2's encoders were still behind Ampere. I'm wondering if anything has changed with the encoder on a 6700 XT?

I have Polaris (RX 580), and the encoder is bad enough on it that it makes 1st-gen PCVR headsets (Rift CV1, OG Vive) look more clear and show finer details than a Quest 2. So until AMD steps up their encoders, NVIDIA's the only ideal choice for VR with this headset.

[phoronix_is_awesome]

Does the GPU encoder tech on the RX 6700 XT compare to or surpass anything on NVIDIA Ampere?.

In order to use the GPU H.265 encoding on AMD GPUs in HandBrake, amf-amdgpu-pro_20.45-1164792_amd64.deb package must be installed, which limits you to the AMD official Linux Pro 20.45 drivers, which in turn limits you to 5.4 LTS kernels and a subpar OpenGL OpenCL driver compared to mesa 21.0rc5 via the ernstp ppa. I am stuck on 5.11 xanmod edge non-cacule kernel at this moment, so I am choosing to run Renoir without GPU H.265 encoding capabilities in Handbrake because ernstp ppa gave me 30% FPS boost compared to AMD's official 20.45 Pro Linux driver which is a sad situation that official driver is slower than a third party ppa supported by a German.

Just a friendly gesture to AMD users who are hell bent on using AMD GPUs, pony up the cash to buy 6800/6800XT 256bit or even Polaris 256bit instead. I have issues with AMD's design intentions with 6700XT and 6900XT SKUs.

[agd5f]

In order to use the GPU H.265 encoding on AMD GPUs in HandBrake, amf-amdgpu-pro_20.45-1164792_amd64.deb package must be installed

The packaged drivers use the same code from mesa for multimedia. If you are seeing issues with upstream mesa, please file a bug.

[phoronix_is_awesome]

The packaged drivers use the same code from mesa for multimedia. If you are seeing issues with upstream mesa, please file a bug.

agd5f
Is there an apt install command for the upstream mesa "amf" package that HandBrake can see and use? I would love to be able to do GPU H.265 encoding in Handbrake using 5.11 xanmod kernel and mesa 21.0 ppa.

[aufkrawall]

The packaged drivers use the same code from mesa for multimedia. If you are seeing issues with upstream mesa, please file a bug.

AMF is proprietary, isn't it? Handbrake unfortunately doesn't support OMX or VAAPI and afair their statement was they don't want to either. Handbrake Linux version apparently is 2nd class citizen.

[ddriver]

No compute?

[agd5f]

Ah, I didn't realize you were talking about AMF.

[phoronix_is_awesome]

AMF is proprietary, isn't it? Handbrake unfortunately doesn't support OMX or VAAPI and afair their statement was they don't want to either. Handbrake Linux version apparently is 2nd class citizen.

Exactly, therefore, as far as I know, unless you use 20.45 Pro Linux driver, you can't use AMF, so I choose to just do without GPU H265 encoding, OpenCL to use Mesa 21.0rc5 package through the ernstp ppa. For whatever unknown reason, the kisak/kisak-mesa 21.0 stable ppa is 20% slower on my Renoir laptop.