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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

I see there's support for the new Radeon RX480. I've been thinking about picking up a Radeon card. Can anyone speak to their experience of Radeon support on Linux and whether or not you think it's a good idea?

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The kernel driver for newer AMD cards is developed and open sources by AMD itself . For the user land, you have choice between the open source driver, Mesa, or the proprietary one, AMDGPU-PRO.

If you want to follow the advancement of Linux graphics stack (while having reasonable graphic performance), AMD is your choice. This is where the exciting new stuff, like Wayland, DRI3 etc. happens. The NVIDIA proprietary driver indeed has amazing performance, but is falling behind on this regard.

The RX480 w/AMDGPU-PRO works pretty well in most cases for desktop/gaming/OpenCL use.

AMD's Linux team is in the middle of a big push to modernize the driver and software stack. It seems they consider it a mostly working preliminary version.

You can choose-your-own-adventure with the totally open amdgpu+mesa stack or use the proprietary AMDGPU-PRO. You can follow development of the open source parts on this mailing list:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/

I do agree with others that NVIDIA is a better choice if you want something that just works and you don't care about proprietary vs. open source.

From my experience using AMD cards, the linux drivers have some serious issues, to the point where on-board intel graphics would give me much more stability. With AMD cards I would get excessive screen tearing just from dragging or resizing windows in a desktop environment. The advantage of AMD is that their open source drivers are acceptable, where nvidia's open source drivers are not great.

In terms of stability, the proprietary nvidia drivers are simply the best, and gave me significantly less issues. For my daily workstation I even ended up replacing my (expensive) AMD card for an nvidia one because the desktop environment felt like it was running less than 10 fps, and it triggered me to no end.

Even if AMD gets equal or even better performance than nvidia in gaming environments, I am not willing to compromise the desktop for that.

If you don't mind using the closed-souce nvidia driver, I strongly suggest nvidia.

The open source drivers/cards were solid for a good while on my old computer but I bought a new one in May and I got actual hardware level PCI errors with two different AMD cards on the Intel X99 chipset (within seconds of booting I would start getting error correction messages in my dmesg and the computer would hang within hours). I managed to stop the errors with kernel flags (pcie_aspm=off or pci=nommconf, either seemed to stop them) but my system was still completely unstable as the drivers/cards eventually went nuts regardless.

I bought an nVidia card and didn't have to touch anything and it's completely stable (in the same exact PCI slot).

I might try AMD again in a year or two as I prefer their model of actually supporting and writing open source drivers in contrast to the scummy nVidia whose cards now require a signed firmware that they won't release to the open source community after we got the reverse engineered open source drivers (well, they did release one now for the 9xx series after they released the 10xx series).

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