AMD Announces Radeon RX 7900 XTX / RX 7900 XT Graphics Cards - Linux Driver Support Expectations

[WannaBeOCer]

Except they're not as much of a boost as Nvidia's were. 2.7x is significant, but when fp32 compute is 2.6x as fast, and overall performance is 1.7x as fast, it doesn't look great at all. I guess it would be a non-trivial win, if AI can run independently from their Wave32 compute, though I doubt it. If they're anything like Nvidia's Tensor "Cores", they'll still share the same register file and be driven by the same warp/wavefront that does normal SIMD compute.

Nvidia artificially limits RTX consumer GPUs tensor core performance with their firmware. If AMD doesn't they can outperform the RTX 3090 if it's actually a 2.7x increase. Will definitely be slower than the RTX 4090 but about 20% faster than the RTX 3090 in deep learning.

https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks

[Michael]

I am so glad that you put your obligation to your son above all else Michael. You only have a few years to truly make a lasting impression upon him, and delay is simply not possible.

As parents all the other things in our lives, that we once considered so critical, must be reevaluated and placed in new perspective. Your son will one day realize and recognize and love you even more for whatever sacrifices you make. I know, as my son is 29 now. And remembers that the only times I stopped working were to care and have fun with him.

Great review by the way, the new cards look awesome!

Well, now to hope I don't get left out on review samples or anything.... But communicated weeks ago I had some appointments this week with my son turning 3 next week, so hopefully all works out fine and I still get the hardware in time for launch day reviews.... Otherwise will be upset.

[brad0]

For the same reasons a Windows user needs it for!

Windows users do not.

[muncrief]

Well, now to hope I don't get left out on review samples or anything.... But communicated weeks ago I had some appointments this week with my son turning 3 next week, so hopefully all works out fine and I still get the hardware in time for launch day reviews.... Otherwise will be upset.

I don't believe that will happen Michael.

You have worked incredibly hard for many years and become an invaluable, respected, and trusted member of the Linux community. So that now companies rely on you mentioning and reviewing them.

In any case, you have no choice. As I said, no delay is possible. And 3 years old is a fantastic time for children. They are just beginning to understand the world, and look at it through their parents eyes.

Show him what is important, by example in everything you do.

[jaxa]

If you are choosing between the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, priced exactly at their MSRPs, it seems like the XTX is a no-brainer for $100 more (~11%). I'm surprised they didn't make the gap $200.

[Danny3]

[QUOTE=Hibbelharry;n1355635]

For the same reasons a Windows user needs it for!

Except next to noone uses any of those panels, even in Windows.

Mostly useless bling bling.



Things should just work with no adjustments needed, thats convenience.



Most of that information is there. Someone just needs to write a GUI for that...except noone seems to care at all.

I do!
And I bet a lot of Windows users do it too, otherwise AMD wouldn't work so much on it.
Just because for you it's useless bling bling, it doesn't mean that for others it's the same
Things work without adjustment but how the driver will know my preferences, that for example I prefer 10bit output instead of the default 8bit, or that I prefer GPU scaling instead of my panel scaling or that I prefer lower performance, but more energy savings and silence?
And no, most of the information is not there as the driver doesn't just provide it!
For example, where are the monitor details, like you can see on Windows?
Where is the HDMI link speed in Gb/s like you can see on Windows?
Where is the GPU usage like you can see on Windows?
I'll tell you, the driver doesn't provide it, even on command line or a text file!
If it did, someone would've already created a GUI as that's easy to do, but the AMD's Linux driver is missing a lot of the info needed for a GUI.

I (and many others, judging by search results) have been using https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl as of late. Hits most of your points, though beware of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1925 if you're running a new GPU with a slightly older kernel.

CoreCtrl is so barebones that it's pretty much useless!
There's no: Radeon Image Sharpening, Anti-Lag, chill, Boost, Enhanced sync, GPU scaling, color depth, chroma subsampling, etc

There's community tools that do most of these things. I don't know which limited DE you are using - but KDE gives me res, overscan, rotation, scaling, RGB Range, VRR/Freesync. For fans etc I fireup corectrl.

I'm scratching my head on why you would need amd to make a control center when the work is already done. Have their limited linux developers focus on driver and hardware enablement in amdvlk and mesa/radv

As I said above, most of the things is probably compared to Linux, but compared to Windows there's just a few of the things.
For example I want to be able to set 10bit with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling or 4:4:4, GPU scaling instead of panel scaling, virtual super resolution, anti-aliasing method, texture filtering quality and a maxim refresh rate.
How do you suppose I can do that with KDE or Corectrl?

I really don't understand what's so out of the ordinary for Linux users that I want a control panel for the GPU.
Windows users never say "Hey AMD, we don't need it because we can already set the resolution and refresh rate in Windows' control panel!"
They embrace it and use it to tweak their GPU driver or hardware for the quality, performance or the power savings they need.

Can't Linux users be the same like "Hey AMD, it's not clear if we need it or not, but it's good to have it and if you can please create one, especially since we have so many desktop environments and it will be hard to have a GPU control panel in all of them!"?
I mean, why we Linux users should be so poor compared to Windows users for the same hardware, why shouldn't we have the ability to tell the GPU: "Hey GPU, I want you to stretch and scale the image as I trust more your dedicated hardware than my cheaper monitor to preserve the quality!".
No wonder we don't have good scaling and crisp easy to read texts on Linux, besides the fonts and DEs problems.

[piotrj3]

I'm a long time Geforce user and I'm seriously considering getting a new RX 7900, as I especially like AMD's stance on open source, but I am utterly confused about the driver situation. I'm using Ubuntu and I'm used only have one driver to install (nvidia-driver-###) and then I'm all set. What's messing with my mind is the bit below:



To an outsider like it it seems like there are several different drivers, or combination of drivers. Will I (most likely) need to upgrade to a newer kernel than what's included in Ubuntu 22.10 by default? What is "the RADV Vulkan driver". How does it relate to "RadeonSI Gallium3D", if at all? How do I figure out what I should use? Can both be installed at the same time? Do they provide the same functionality? Is RADV required for Vulkan? Does that driver also support OpenGL for all non-Vulkan titles? There's also something called AMDGPU and AMDGPU-PRO. How do they fit in with all this?

Or am I just overthinking all this, and all I have to do is plop in an AMD graphics card and it'll just work?

I would be more careful until launch happens.

With RDNA 1 and RX590 (and i think Vega too?) there weren't open source drivers at all properly working at launch. I think i remember Micheal having issues benchmarking for example RX590 as at launch even GIT of mesa couldn't support it. In general almost for sure ubuntu 22.10 won't support it without backporting (But that takes time)

[piotrj3]

Except they're not as much of a boost as Nvidia's were. 2.7x is significant, but when fp32 compute is 2.6x as fast, and overall performance is 1.7x as fast, it doesn't look great at all. I guess it would be a non-trivial win, if AI can run independently from their Wave32 compute, though I doubt it. If they're anything like Nvidia's Tensor "Cores", they'll still share the same register file and be driven by the same warp/wavefront that does normal SIMD compute.

I suspect it is memory bandwidth starved situation. 6950XT is 256bit memory bus with 18Gbps, 7900XTX is 384bit with 20Gdps. That by itself is 66.7% faster which is extremly close to 1.7x AMD is claiming. Probably AMD with double units wants to improve performance in stuff less to typical graphical pipeline, for example for now everyone is using Nvidia for Blender, compute, etc. With RDNA1, AMD had to put price down because even if they were equal to Nvidia performance/price ratio, they are worse for compute, blender, raytracing etc.

RDNA3 probably aims to close those gaps and this is why AMD more focus on raytracing, Tflops, FSR3 and even points out in eyes of nvidia look we have DP 2.1.

That being said, it seems RTX 4090 is not competition they are willing to compare to. This is why their flagship is 999$ (while nvidia 1600$), and they didn't show comparison to it - because AMD doesn't want to.

[Grim85]

[QUOTE=Danny3;n1355659]

How do you suppose I can do that with KDE or Corectrl?

I'm not aware of 10bit colour being supported. But when colour and gamma etc are supported and exposed in proper wayland extensions, KDE/Gnome/Wlroots in the very least will add settings for it, same as it has for VRR and RGB. FSR and some of those other features either don't have Linux equivalents or are controlled at launch time.

It's fair to think you need it, but as a platform Linux really doesn't. Hell as wayland takes off and nvidia moves to its open modules I don't think the nvidia xsettings panel is going to be much use either

edit: 10bit colour is supported in KDE from 5.24 onwards and is enabled automatically if your hardware supports it. Channel output in wayland is controlled on a per application basis, video players etc would need to explicitly request it from the compositor. Xavier Hugl covers it here

[Gps4life]

I'm a long time Geforce user and I'm seriously considering getting a new RX 7900, as I especially like AMD's stance on open source, but I am utterly confused about the driver situation. I'm using Ubuntu and I'm used only have one driver to install (nvidia-driver-###) and then I'm all set. What's messing with my mind is the bit below:



To an outsider like it it seems like there are several different drivers, or combination of drivers. Will I (most likely) need to upgrade to a newer kernel than what's included in Ubuntu 22.10 by default? What is "the RADV Vulkan driver". How does it relate to "RadeonSI Gallium3D", if at all? How do I figure out what I should use? Can both be installed at the same time? Do they provide the same functionality? Is RADV required for Vulkan? Does that driver also support OpenGL for all non-Vulkan titles? There's also something called AMDGPU and AMDGPU-PRO. How do they fit in with all this?

Or am I just overthinking all this, and all I have to do is plop in an AMD graphics card and it'll just work?

I am on openSUSE tumbleweed, and can confirm that for an AMD card you don't need to install drivers. Radeon RX 570 in my case.

They are good in games too.

Unlike the opensource Nvidia drivers, those are not an option for gamers.

Since tumbleweed is a rolling release and Ubuntu is not, you might have to update the kernel and mesa yourself.