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I'm one of the lucky 14 who won a RX480 on the AMD AMA thread on Reddit.
Very happy to ditch my Geforce 960 for a driver supported by proper, open-source drivers. However, I realized the obvious shortly thereafter that while the open source support means support out-of-the-box, that won't really apply until the next major distro releases. So great news for Fedora 25, not so great for Fedora 24.
When considering the effort required to build my own kernel, mesa, etc -- things I'm capable of doing, but which I haven't done in the better part of a decade because I simply don't want to --, I re-evaluated the purpose of my desktop. I only use it for games, due to my laptop being my primary computer. So, I replaced Fedora with SteamOS. That link leads to my post on reddit, but thought folks here might be more interested in the process.
Install Procedure
Out of the box (post-install), it doesn't work. Not even as well as Fedora's generic GPU support. All that is displayed is the standard "Oh no" gnome error. This is likely due to Fedora having llvm-pipe, and the older Debian-based SteamOS might not have a software fallback for unsupported cards. The AMDGPU-PRO driver for SteamOS is still beta-only. So I need to switch to the beta channel: ctrl+alt+f2 to get to a terminal. Login with desktop/desktop
Don't reboot yet, though. During my initial testing, I reached a bootloop due to a problem with steam's updater in the beta (not amdgpu-pro specific). To work around this, disable autologin for steam user, and set a password:
Upon reboot, log in as the steam user. It auto-downloads a steam update. However, I noticed some graphics flickering while it was doing this. Upon completion of that, it auto reboots into clonezilla and images steamos to a recovery image. Upon manually rebooting after that, it boots to a "Preparing hardware drivers" screen for a while. The screen goes black for a bit. I thought something was wrong. Then it reboots again, I think (I was using my other computer, typing the post for reddit).
(this is where the boot-loop would occur if you didn't disable auto-login).
Upon rebooting again, log in as 'desktop'. Open a terminal, su to steam, then run the steam client. (In retrospect, you could probably log in as 'steam' instead, since we set a password for it, and just ensure your session is set to Gnome instead of SteamOS).
Once steam updates, log out. At the login screen, switch to "SteamOS" via the top-right session selector, and log in as 'steam' user. Now you're cooking with gas.
Note: You can re-enable autologin. However, it might be an idea to set a 1 or 2 second timeout to give you an easy-out for potential steam updater issues.
Current Status
At the main screen, I'm currently experiencing some flickering, as well as distorted sound. However, after starting a game (original Portal), that all goes away once the game is rendering a scene. It reminds me of playing around with power scaling with the nouveau driver. I wonder if the AMDGPU-PRO driver has some issues at lower power settings currently (at least the version shipped with steamos).
Portal anyway runs at >200fps, but with a few drops to 90fps when looking through some portals. Interestingly, it felt like there was a fair amount of input latency. It was annoying in a single player puzzler, but would likely be extremely troubling for a FPS. So it's kicking out lots of frames, but something else is a little weird still. Not sure how to debug that.
Future Steps
Very happy to ditch my Geforce 960 for a driver supported by proper, open-source drivers. However, I realized the obvious shortly thereafter that while the open source support means support out-of-the-box, that won't really apply until the next major distro releases. So great news for Fedora 25, not so great for Fedora 24.
When considering the effort required to build my own kernel, mesa, etc -- things I'm capable of doing, but which I haven't done in the better part of a decade because I simply don't want to --, I re-evaluated the purpose of my desktop. I only use it for games, due to my laptop being my primary computer. So, I replaced Fedora with SteamOS. That link leads to my post on reddit, but thought folks here might be more interested in the process.
Install Procedure
Out of the box (post-install), it doesn't work. Not even as well as Fedora's generic GPU support. All that is displayed is the standard "Oh no" gnome error. This is likely due to Fedora having llvm-pipe, and the older Debian-based SteamOS might not have a software fallback for unsupported cards. The AMDGPU-PRO driver for SteamOS is still beta-only. So I need to switch to the beta channel: ctrl+alt+f2 to get to a terminal. Login with desktop/desktop
Code:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install steamos-beta-repo sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get remove .*fglrx.* sudo apt-get install .*amdgpu.* amdgpu-pro-lib32 sudo update-initramfs -u
Code:
cp /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/20_steamos.conf ~/ sudo -e /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/20_steamos.conf sudo passwd steam
(this is where the boot-loop would occur if you didn't disable auto-login).
Upon rebooting again, log in as 'desktop'. Open a terminal, su to steam, then run the steam client. (In retrospect, you could probably log in as 'steam' instead, since we set a password for it, and just ensure your session is set to Gnome instead of SteamOS).
Code:
su - steam steam
Note: You can re-enable autologin. However, it might be an idea to set a 1 or 2 second timeout to give you an easy-out for potential steam updater issues.
Current Status
At the main screen, I'm currently experiencing some flickering, as well as distorted sound. However, after starting a game (original Portal), that all goes away once the game is rendering a scene. It reminds me of playing around with power scaling with the nouveau driver. I wonder if the AMDGPU-PRO driver has some issues at lower power settings currently (at least the version shipped with steamos).
Portal anyway runs at >200fps, but with a few drops to 90fps when looking through some portals. Interestingly, it felt like there was a fair amount of input latency. It was annoying in a single player puzzler, but would likely be extremely troubling for a FPS. So it's kicking out lots of frames, but something else is a little weird still. Not sure how to debug that.
Future Steps
- Figure out why input sucks
- Figure out why the screen flickers
- Run the unigine benchmarks to compare against my Geforce 960 on the same hardware (albeit on Fedora 24). I didn't run the PTS because I couldn't be bothered to figure out how.
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