2y ago

How's the driver situation for the new AMD cards?

Usually I'm not hopefull for newly released cards but this arch has already been out for almost a year so it should be a bit less dire, right?

[edit] So the results are in and the verdict is: still kind of unreliable with some people having a good time and some having a bad time. Awesome. I'll just wait a bit. Thanks for the comments everyone 👍

17 comments

On my Radeon 680M, I am getting constant freezes whenever I use video acceleration in KDE Wayland and I am not the only one. This bug has existed for almost a year and it's been driving me insane. I really don't see the awesome AMD driver situation everyone talks about.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2220#note_2072337
- Omg I thought I was the only one with this issue, constant playback freezes, sometimes if I watch too much video accelerated content whole system crashes, and after a while with or without accelerated content I get weird artefacts all over the screen. (680M)
  
  Yeah I also get the playback freezes. It does work better in X11, but then it almost begs the question why I even got an AMD device in the first place.
Very well supported by Mesa. I do see more issues regarding the 7000 series compared to the 6000 series though, I guess they put more effort into the RDNA2 driver because of the steam deck.
I've had a 7000-series card since December and haven't experienced any driver issues. Using KDE with Wayland and two monitors. My only complaint is the power use when I go over 60Hz, but maybe it has to do with one of my monitors. This is what I see happening:
Both at 60Hz: 25W
Using only display A at 120Hz: 25W
Using only display B at 120Hz: 90W
Both at 120Hz: 90W
I was hoping some driver update would fix this but by now I've given up. As for gaming experience, I have zero complaints. Big titles I played were Cyberpunk 2077, Remnant 2 and Elden Ring and they performed great.
- I have a 7900 XT also on KDE Wayland with 3 montiors: one 4k@144Hz, one 1080p@144Hz and one 1080p@75Hz and my idle power usage is around 70-80W I believe, around 90W when I watch a 4k video
- Isn't this an intrinsic problem with AMD graphics chips? I thought this was the case on windows as well.
According to phoronix, no issuee at all. Everything runs fine
Im running a 7000 card on Arch since January (7900xt) without issues. For the first 1-2 months I had to install the git version of the drivers from a separate repo, but it still worked like a charm, a thousand times better than Nvidia (not only performance wise)
I have a RX 6700 XT that I got earlier this year. I was imoressed that things just work. Okay, you might be in doubt about which driver to install, but it's much better and easier than Nvidia.
VR is atrocious, everything else is amazing, though I think I'm having issues with something related to OBS screen capture causing hitching. Could be a number of things inside or outside of Mesa.
- VR has been atrocious on AMD linux for years what the hell are they even doing
  
  It's really no better on NVIDIA, in fact its much worse since async reprojection likes to break more often on NVIDIA for some reason, VR in general on Linux is atrocious.
From what I understabd AMD cards are very well supported with Mesa.

17 comments