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Comment by verroq | Hacker News Reader

Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.

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Sadly I have to agree. Ryzen 3400G here, getting hardware transcoding on the iGPU is something I still haven't sorted out. There have been several recent issues in kernel, AGESA firmware (I suspect there might be newer versions with potential fixes that my mobo manufacturer hasn't released yet; this is 1.0.0.4 Patch B) and drivers. I've had several rounds of hunting down and compiling various versions of driver packages, modules and kernels from source, trying third-party PPAs, to no avail. The amdgpu/amdgpupro mess adds another layer of confusion.

I am not sure if I am missing some update, need to set some undocumented kernel flag and/or BIOS setting, if it's a software issue or Í just made a mistake somewhere. Debian 10/11.

Meanwhile, as much as I wanted to get away from Intel, their drivers have never posed any issue at all.

I believe AGESA 1.0.0.4 Patch B broke something for the APUs, you should try either upgrading or downgrading your BIOS but what worked for me was downgrading to AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB, both Windows and Linux has stopped crashing now, although I still get the occasional lockup when browsing with Firefox on Linux. I found out the culprit after stumbling into this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc...

[citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?

No I am thinking of the situation where the open source driver doesn’t have opencl support and the AMD drivers (fglrx) doesn’t compile or requires dependencies so old that it was dropped by the packagers for Arch Linux, all this for a few years until they come out with something that actually works when I’ve never ever had an issue with Nvidia. Also AMD never ever figured out how to fix screen tearing, or do so in a sane that doesn’t involve trial and error editing xorg.conf.

Even on Windows AMD drivers are the most unstable, bugged software that’s even been shipped. It’s been a long standing joke that AMD “has no drivers”.

Yeah, fglrx driver with the issues you mention, offered OpenGL 4.1 support on a graphic card I have.

The open source driver replacement only does OpenGL 3.3.

I guess I should be happy it does any OpenGL at all.

Here, my card on the travel netbook that I use,

https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html

The open source driver is kind of ok if the only thing we expect from it is getting a working X session.

Now if one wants to do some complex OpenGL stuff, then it might work, or not.

That card is super old, before GCN. Have you tried with something a little bit more recent?

I used to have a HD 7950 and it always worked perfectly, same with my current Vega 56.

Sure, how do I replace the card on an otherwise perfectly working laptop?

The usual linux answer to hardware problems, keeps being to buy new hardware.

I would say that's a much more prevalent attitude in the Windows and Mac worlds. Linux tries to keep compatibility with really old software. It was only 4 years ago that major distros started to require at least a 686, aka Pentium Pro, released in November 1995!

But at some point you have to consider if it's really worth it keeping a 10 year old laptop around. It's painful to say them goodbye, I know, I have been there, but for me it's just not worth it.

Asus sold the laptop with Windows 7 support as well, the drivers kept being updated up to Windows 8.1, and thanks to Windows driver ABI, those drivers work perfectly fine in Windows 10.

No need to throw a perfectly working laptop to enjoy the DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 capabilities that it was sold for.

Take any AMD 5000 series card. I had a top of the line 5700.

Still no driver for compute 1 year later. I'm so happy i decided to return it and switch to intel instead of waiting for AMD or some random joe on their free time to add support for it to their open source driver.

So yeah. I'd take a working proprietary driver over no driver any day.

Ryzen 3700X and Radeon 5700 XT here. Not a single problem.

I have recently used Radeon 550, 560, 570, 5500 on AMD 5050e (yes, that old!), Ryzen 1600 (non af), 3100, 3600 and all have worked fine, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04. In fact on average I have found the various hardware configurations to be about 5% faster on Linux than Windows.

It's anecdotal of course, but my RX560 has been absolutely flawless on both Ubuntu and openSUSE, literally out of the box support on a standard install.

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