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Comment by AmVess | Hacker News Reader

They aren't going to win anything until they fix their laughably bad drivers and keep them fixed. I have several Ryzens, but there's no way I'd go anywhere near their graphics cards.

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I'm running an RX 570 on Linux and it works fine for my purposes (work, Steam games & Blizzard games under wine).

Same with a 580. Linux, many monitors, work, light gaming. Drivers are the first time I've ever not had issues with Linux graphics.

Three years in I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Where are the driver issues? I'm certain it was like a law of physics in Linux, but somehow, not this time, not for me?

I have 2x 24" monitors on Ubuntu 18.04.03 with a Radeon RX 580

I can't watch a video on Youtube without substantial tearing on Firefox or Chrome. I've followed close to 20 guides and tried a number of drivers which all fail provide any benefit.

Running glxgears will run at 7400FPS, with minor tearing. My monitors don't have FreeSync or whatever it's called since they're pretty old (over 10 years).

Since most guides are as helpful as "type this into a console" - I haven't learnt anything while trying these fixes.

edit: I tried to install the newest drivers (19.50), and they fail to install with build errors

since I had to uninstall the old ones (19.20) I'm now running Polaris10? drivers by accident, and the tearing issue seems to have disappeared. I have no idea if these are less performant, but they are sufficient for my needs.

Tearing issues tend to be problems of the application, compositor, or Xorg. Nothing the driver can do much about, unfortunately. Xorg in particular is pretty bad at tearing with multi-monitor setups.

Some DDX drivers handle tearing (implementing vsync). Tearing is basically not a problem at all on Wayland compositors since the spec addresses it directly (from what I understand)

Switch to Wayland, your issue is that Xorg is not tear free by default and Ubuntu has chosen to stick with this legacy stack in 18.04: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/xorg-will-default-displa...

My condolences. On Nvidia there is a Full Composition Pipeline option in Nvidia driver settings which gets rid of vsync issues. It's odd it's not on by default.

Wow, that's good to know! How do you turn it on?

(I don't see an option for it in the Nvidia X Server Settings app.)

Nvidia X Server Settings app -> X Server Display Configuration -> Advanced... -> Force Full Composition Pipeline

Note, it is not saved during a reboot unless you click 'Save to X Configuration File' and then save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf for most distros.

Also, many distros have partial v-sync of some sort on. For most it isn't noticeable, but for many desktops it causes the screen to run at an effective 59 instead of 60fps (or that is what it looks like to me, non-scientific here), so it can be beneficial to look up how to turn off vsync on your distro. Eg, I'm on Mint so for me it's General Settings -> VSync method -> None. For most people, this is not a noticeable change.

Thank you for explaining it so clearly.

I have a 580. Have you tried turning on the in-driver vsync option? AMD's implementation of it seems the best to me out of cards I've tried. You can turn it on while X is running easily using xrandr to see if it helps:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMDGPU#Tear_free_render...

Look at your compositor, I've fixed this in KDE by enabling Full Screen Repaints under vsync options.

Switch to Wayland or just enable TearFree on Xorg, something like: `xrandr --output DisplayPort-0 --set TearFree on` of course you have to adjust to your output (`xrandr --props`).

The driver issues are for the 5500, 5600, and 5700 cards. Your card is a gen out of date, so it's fine.

I bought an out-of-date RX570 after the RX5000 series was released, because I wanted mature Linux drivers (and reduced price as vendors cleared out their obsolete stock). It's the first AMD card I've owned that's been completely trouble-free.

Huh, launch day 5700 XT and zero issues ... then again, I don't play older titles which seems to have the most issues.

We bought a few Ryzens with Vega8 for our devs on linux and it was a mistake. Unfortunately integrated graphics glitched horribly and it required us to find right set of kernel flags and features to disable. After encountering bug with amdgpu module randomly giving up, we just used discrete gpu. I don't feel comfortable relying on their gpus after this experience but cpus are undeniably good.

The drivers are perfectly fine, as long as you don't have a new 5xxx card. Those seem to have ongoing issues.

But my experience with AMD cards on Windows and Linux has been overall pretty great.

Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)

How long ago did you try it? It was definitely bad in the fglrx days!

My move happened few months ago. I used Linux for years (and still use it in VMs/servers), however after changing GPU it was a compatibility nightmare. I chose AMD partly because I heard that drivers are good on Linux. Not sure how many hours I spend on it.

Which card is this?

I've installed 3 systems over the past couple years with amd gpus (all rx5XX). Not a single driver issue, nor any setup required.

This is definitely a problem still. The latest Ubuntu won't even boot with a 5700 XT card without first upgrading the Linux firmware.

Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia on Linux???

I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had a truly horrible experience on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a Steam derivative of Wine), as well as native Linux games. So I do want a GPU. (Although, at this point I've even considered getting a laptop with no GPU and only integrated Intel graphics, since I want to at least be able to do business/work without problems.)

I am not saying that. I just had terrible experience on a laptop with AMD GPU + Linux (rip battery) and on a desktop with discrete AMD GPU (suspend and whatnot errors) + Linux. Friends and coworkers with NVIDIA didn't seem to have those problems

AMD GPUs with new architecture need around half a year on Linux to reach stability. At least that was my experience with Navi. But once they reach it, it's rock solid. I wouldn't touch Nvidia at all.

For machine learning, Nvidias driver situation is indeed terrible, but AMDs is worse in this sense: If you get the wrong kernel version, driver version or somehow mismatch the cuda version due to a pinned dependency, you're up the creek. However, everything downstream will work. With AMD, you will get the drivers on your machine no problem but heaven help you if you try to do anything with them (there are regressions and memory leaks, etc.)

He might not be saying that; but I can.

I have a fair number of machines and I /typically/ buy laptop/desktops with intels' graphics which works wonderfully under linux.

On the occasion I use a descreet graphics card (Quatro M1200, GTX 670) it' usually nvidia, and it works pretty good if you have the proprietary driver installed. (even on FreeBSD).

I did, however, recently build a full AMD machine that I intended to use for linux gaming, I did the most "happy path" thing and installed Ubuntu.

It was a Ryzen 1700x with an AMD R9 390 (old at this point, but it was built when Ryzen just came out) and I genuinely couldn't get 3d Accel working at all. Games ran like absolute garbage. I ended up installing all kinds of "amd" "amd-pro" and "radeon" drivers which came with various warnings about being out of date or proprietary.. or "this should be in the kernel as FOSS".. but it never worked.

I ended up selling the machine 2 years later.

Contrastly my laptop has hybrid graphics with Nvidia and is still working fine. :(

Υes they are, I am still waiting for the day that the Brazos APU will be properly supported in the open source driver, while fxglr was doing just fine.

Problem is, takes to non-existing driver ABI newer kernels don't take fxglr anymore, and proper Brazos support is most likely on no one's agenda.

The NVidia Optimus switchable cards are not well supported on Linux.

On desktop NVidia is good. On laptops I like Intel graphics. because I don't want to muck around with getting working drivers.

I agree. On laptops I usually have an nVidia hybrid GPU but I always switch it off as I don't need it and use only the embedded Intel GPU.

Actually getting the nVidia GPU "really" switched off has often been a bit of a challenge.

Currently on a Lenovo P71 what I do is to have the nVidia-module not loaded (blacklisted or not even installed), load the "bbswitch" module and then execute "tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF" (and check with "cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch" if it returns "OFF"). Without doing this I noticed that the internal temperature when idle was a bit higher than what I thought it should be, so I must assume that otherwise the nVidia kind-of-GPU still consumes some watts even if the module is not even loaded/present.

Nouveau ought to turn the card off automatically, if loaded. It might not be able to do anything else, but it should at least do that.

NVidia on desktop "works" for me, but suspend/resume is a fiasco - one cycle and the graphics are never right again, flickering and crap everywhere.

> It might not be able to do anything else, but it should at least do that. LOL... :)

Thx - I never even took into consideration Nouveau.

Sorry, I have 0 experience with desktop & suspend (I have 2 desktops, both of them using nVidia, but they're basically servers running databases so I have never made them go to sleep).

They are good now.

I am writing this comment in a laptop with Radeon Vega 8 graphics and Ryzen 5 CPU running Ubuntu 19.10.

I am playing Audiosurf2 in the second workspace.

Hard agree. I'm an "AMD fanboy" of sorts, and I abandoned their graphics cards for desktop use after a terrible experience with the drivers. Of course at the time I was using Crossfire. But even without Crossfire trying to use AMD on Linux or BSD is much harder than nVidia. Windows or Linux, simple or complex, the AMD drivers are just bad.

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