[c0ffe]

I would like to know if somebody has good experiences to share about AMD video cards on Linux (with the latest driver AMDGPU).

I bought a Ryzen (Zen 2) for workstation, where I need to run a few VMs, a local k8s cluster, run builds, some browsers tabs, and Slack. I have everything running smoothly on top of a Linux 5 kernel, and so far, Im pleased with the results.

But I kept an older NVIDIA card, and the drivers always had a bit of trouble with desktop Linux support (like Wayland, plymouth bootsplash, etc).

[tadfisher]

I ran a Radeon 380 between 2015 and this year, it worked flawlessly.

I bought a 5700 XT in July; it was not usable out of the box, but all the pieces are at least upstreamed now. Desktop stability is great, gaming performance is great, and all the basic stuff (Wayland, Plymouth) is solid.

[zanny]

I've been using AMD GPUs since they first stabilized the radeonsi driver ~6 years ago.

7870 -> 290 -> 580 -> just got a 5700 XT yesterday.

They are good. It generally takes 6 months after a card is announced for the drivers to work properly, but I'm currently on linux-mainline 5.4r6 and mesa-git and the 5700 XT is working nicely. On 5.3 and Mesa 19.2 / LLVM 9 there were a lot of graphical glitches and crashes, so that series should be in place within a few months.

The other 3 just keep chugging along working nicely. The 7870 is too old to get AMDGPU / Vulkan support unless its turned on manually, but that has worked in light testing.

My only complaint is that hardware video encoding is awful - it hogs enough resources to substantially hamper game performance if used concurrently, enough that it makes more sense to software encode on a beefier CPU than to try to use the hardware encoder on the GPU.

[disintegore]

On Linux, AMD has a MAJOR advantage over Nvidia simply due to the fact that the driver is FLOSS and built into the kernel itself. This means you get full GPU support out of the box and fixes/improvements are delivered through the same update channel as the kernel.

The userland tools aren't ported to Linux however, so you don't get access to the fancy social-media-augmented gamer stuff. If you want to overclock/etc you have to rely either on a /sys filesystem interface (which wasn't stabilized when I tried it but could very well be now) or third party tools of varying quality.

As for the actual experience itself, I've owned GPUs from multiple architectures (Polaris, Raven Ridge, Vega) and I've noticed a common pattern. When the hardware is new, it's unstable. A few kernel updates later (typically over a month) they run flawlessly. To be fair a lot of the crashes/freezes I've experienced could be traced down to Mesa and LLVM. I still would give new AMD hardware time to mature though.

Performance is on par with the Windows driver package (probably because they share a lot of code). You get your money's worth. Some of the games I run on DXVK offer near-native performance.

tl;dr there's never been better a GPU driver on Linux but it's not quite ready for your grandma yet

[frio]

I've got an RX580; it works almost flawlessly, including for games emulated via Proton/etc.. The only significant problem I've had was when I (unwittingly) received a new Mesa installation (I'm on NixOS/unstable, so, rolling release) and everything I'd already played stopped working. Took me a while to figure out I had to delete shaders that'd been cached for the older version of Mesa. I imagine most non-rolling distros wouldn't have that problem.

[account42]

That should not happen on rolling release distros either - sounds like it would be a NixOS packaging issue where the version (or git commit hash) of Mesa/LLVM is missing or the Nix package applied patches without changing the version in the cache key.

[scns]

Bought a RX570, worked great. Undervolted for more performance, would recommend it.