A Word Of Warning When Using AMDGPU-PRO On An Unsupported Kernel

[phoenk]

I'm seeing a lot of silly comments in this thread of people debating back and forth over team red vs green and their proprietary drivers. For the other 90% of us that want something that "just works," your distro most likely bundles mesa by default. If you have AMD or Intel hardware, you are all set. Unless you have some odd use case, mesa will be perfect for you. It can play just about all of your games just fine. If you have an nvidia card, you will have to figure out how to use their proprietary driver, because they actively attempt to cripple the open source driver. I'm told that Ubuntu makes installing the proprietary driver easy, but your mileage may vary. I've only had good results with mesa for a few years now.

[atmartens]

For the other 90% of us that want something that "just works," your distro most likely bundles mesa by default. If you have AMD or Intel hardware, you are all set... I've only had good results with mesa for a few years now.

That's my experience as well.

[Guest]

AMD's drivers are such a mess. I can't wait to replace my 390X. With my old card (GTX 560 Ti), I would just select that I wanted the driver during install and the package manager would keep it up to date for me. With this card, I've had to add repos, create xorg files, and even recompiled my kernel in an effort to get any sort of usability out of it. Having to sacrifice other kernel updates and improvements to use their PRO driver is not ok.

Why do you need GPU-PRO with your 390X? Or a better question is, why can't you use the open-source AMDGPU driver?

As for the list of steps needed:

- What distro were you using?
- What repos do you have to add?
- Why did you need to create xorg files?

My general understanding of GPU-PRO is, on a supported distro, you download the driver, run it, reboot, and profit. If you're on an unsupported distro; then it's really no different than dealing with NVIDIA's driver on an unsupported distro (I have NVIDIA graphics in my laptop; unsupported distros are hell compared to anything I've ever had to deal with with fglrx).

Radv makes great progress, but isn't a conformant driver yet.

If it works for the end-user, does it matter how conformant it really is? NVIDIA's driver last I heard wasn't very "conforming" to standards, and yet most end-users have no issue with it.

[bridgman]

There would have been a brief period a couple of years ago during the transition to glamor when editing xorg would probably have been required.

If Dreakon's list is meant to be an accumulation of all the things that might have had to be done at some point during the last few years while the open source drivers were in development it's probably fair... just not as a description of today's state unless you are installing on a *really* old distro (in which case fglrx is probably running just fine anyways).

[dungeon]

fglrx driver runs fine here even with 4.9-rc5 kernel (and all kernels before that) on Debian 8 if someone wondering about that , sometimes needs patching of course more or less but that is usual just like dealing with nvidia driver.

[dungeon]

But generaly Vulkan is faster with amdgpu-pro, if you have something else faster you probably hitting some bug. On OpenGL side amdgpu-pro is still slower than fglrx, that is what i call transit regression

So to conclude and to be fair to both sides, opensource amdgpu can be faster then amdgpu-pro just because that regression happened

[humbug]

Any news on when AMDGPU PRO comes out of beta? It's the only performant vulkan driver AMD has right now, so I am just looking forward to it being released with wider distro and kernel compatibility.

[dungeon]

Any news on when AMDGPU PRO comes out of beta?

I don't think amdgpu-pro is in beta, only where i see beta mentioned is once and just in its consumer download url - so it is probably just a leftover

[Dreakon]

Why do you need GPU-PRO with your 390X? Or a better question is, why can't you use the open-source AMDGPU driver?

As for the list of steps needed:

- What distro were you using?
- What repos do you have to add?
- Why did you need to create xorg files?

I tried all the drivers I could in an effort to get better performance out of my card. As for why I would like to use the PRO driver in particular, well because I paid damn near $350 for my card so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to be able to use the features that were supposed to work, like Vulkan. Why can’t I use the open-source AMDGPU driver? Well, mainly because that driver doesn’t support my card. I’ve used it before by recompiling my kernel to enable it, but doing so caused massive screen tearing and really didn’t make anything better. So I use the radeon driver as it’s been the one I’ve had the most success with.




As for your interrogation questions.




- I’ve used just about every modern distro on distrowatch in an effort to get this card to work properly. If it’s listed and regularly updated, I’ve probably used it. Though I’ve settled on Antergos because it’s the one I’ve had the most success with.

-What repos I’ve added. In Ubuntu based distros, I’ve used Padoka and Oibaf. In Arched based distros I’ve used Miffe and Mesa-git.

-Why I needed to create xorg files. Because of the massive screen tearing issues when trying to use AMDGPU (didn’t help). And also to enable DRI3 and glamour.




“If Dreakon's list is meant to be an accumulation of all the things that might have had to be done at some point during the last few years while the open source drivers were in development it's probably fair... just not as a description of today's state unless you are installing on a *really* old distro (in which case fglrx is probably running just fine anyways).”



Really? Because I’m running on kernel 4.8.7-1 right now and it doesn’t get much newer than that without going into RC kernels and the performance is still pretty disappointing. Granted, I’ve seen some pretty big improvements over the last year, but I’m still stuck booting into Windows to play anything remotely demanding. I’m not just trolling here. I legit have 5 AMD GPU’s in my house right now and I’ve supported AMD for years. It’s frustrating because had I spent half what I did on an Nvidia card, I would have been much better off.

[bridgman]

Dreakon, are you seeing better performance with AMDGPU-PRO than with the combination of radeon, recent kernel and a PPA for recent userspace ?

There has been a fair amount of performance work on the all-open stack recently and my impression that average performance with the all-open stack had largely caught up with the amdgpu-pro OpenGL.