Hacker News Reader

Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

I don't trust AMDs drivers after my experience with a RX 6600 XT (which I chose, in part, because of it's open source drivers) on Ubuntu. I experience the following:

* system crashes if I turn on my monitors at the wrong time when waking from sleep. One trigger seems to be a monitor powering on while I'm logging in. Both screens go black and I'm forced to do a hard reboot.

* flickering and parts of the screen going black, which seems to be related to video playback but occurs at other time (for example, while typing this comment)

I didn't have either problem with the NVIDIA card that I used previously.

View on HN

> on Ubuntu

This might be your problem - the kernel that ships with Ubuntu is often very old.

My 5700XT ran like crap under Ubuntu - switching to a distro[0] with the latest kernel fixed all my problems.

You can't be mad at AMD because Canonical ship an old kernel!

[0] Any distro with a recent kernel will do. I picked Gentoo, but that's irrelevant.

No need to switch, since you can use a kernel by https://xanmod.org

Running a somewhat current Mesa3d should also matter.

Ubuntu's stack is just prehistoric.

I'll try updating that as well as my kernel. Thanks for the suggestion.

For Mesa you can use this PPA https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+ppa-packages

Thanks! I've switched to that and my flickering is greatly reduced!

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm on 5.19, which is fairly recent, but I'll try upgrading to 6 to see what happens.

If you never hear from me again, know that I don't regret bricking my machine and I'm sure 2023 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Do consider switching to Pop_OS, they're Ubuntu with much better UX and get kernel updates faster.

Good luck. :)

Upgraded the kernel and Mesa3d and flickering is greatly reduced! Thanks again!

You can use ukuu to get a newer kernel, which will help. I had a similar experience with 5700XT at launch, and it really didn't clear up until the next major release and I had issues with a few things running a more bleeding edge kernel.

Unfortunately, a lot of things don't get shaken out before release because of limited access to hardware. Within around 6 months things are generally a lot better. I wound up switching to a 3080 as I wanted to play with RTX and CUDA, thinking of jumping to an RX 7900 XTX in March/April if prices are still competitive. It won't be as good as 4080 for RTX, but similar to 3080 performance, which for me has been usable.

For the system crashing issue, do you happen to have the different monitors connected via different connector/protocol types, like one HDMI and one DP?

I had a similar issue with my previous GPU, an RX560, where my system would sometimes freeze either while turning the monitors on or other times when it was locked with both monitors off.

On the 560 I had no choice but to connect 1x DP + 1x HDMI but on my newer 6700xt I connected both monitors via DP and the whole class of issues just went away.

Thanks for the suggestion. I found others mentioning this issue so I switched to both on DP and unfortunately the problem continues.

It is irrational, and I know it, but I had so many issues with drivers for Radeon 9550, almost 20 years ago that I am still afraid to buy another AMD card.

>almost 20 years ago

Yeah, that was ATI, pre-AMD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com