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Comment by aero-glide2 | Hacker News Reader

This is about CPU, not GPU. Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.

> Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.

This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.

For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.

This has been my experience with my Radeon RX 6750 XT and Manjaro. I didn't have to do anything and it just works. I use Steam/Proton to game and that just works as well.

The 7850 was from the transition period where the radeon development was ending but it also didn't get immediate amdgpu support.

An earlier card will use radeon and be easy to setup, a later one will use amdgpu and be easy to set up. That generation takes a bit of work.

HD7850 is a SI family card so should be supported by radeonsi, no? Where is the difficulty in getting it running? Do you mean Vulkan support for DXVK?

AMD GPU drivers come with Linux distributions by default. There's literally nothing you have to do, unless your GPU is very recent.

My gpu is quite recent and the only thing I had to do was make sure I'm running a recent kernel.

I also had to make sure I'm running a decent enough MESA and a recent enough llvm and a recent enough linux-firmware. It's not trivial.

But if you're on a distro with a recent enough version of those things, it Just Works.

I do wish distros like Ubuntu were more on the ball with regards to hardware support though. Ideally, someone running an up to date Ubuntu LTS should have a system which just works with new AMD hardware within at most a few weeks. It's currently a matter of many many months.

Just as difficult? AMD GPUs are plug-and-play on linux (if you have latest gen you should run a recent enough kernel but that's basically it), whereas Nvidia GPUs need their proprietary drivers which adds much more complexity for beginner users.

I'm not even sure why people have this myth that AMD's GPU support is good on linux. Having an upstreamed driver doesn't mean much when it's just as buggy and unstable as the closed drivers were 10-15 years ago. Everyone I know using a modern AMD GPU on Linux evangelize the fuck out of them while simultaneously complaining about constant black screens/hard freezes/poor performance in games/etc. I've never experienced such issues with nvidia and besides the annoyance of having to make sure you have the proprietary blob installed there's no real issues.

I genuinely don’t recognise what you’re describing - for context I have a AMD APU system (5750GE - zen 3 and vega GPU cores), and a steam deck. I’ve had the APU for over a year now. I also have a desktop with a NVIDIA 3090.

All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.

Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

My experience is that universally my linux gamer friends who own AMD products have worse experiences than I do - they are absolutely usable, but not worth buying at all if your primary purpose for owning a GPU is gaming.

> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.

Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.

I’m playing quite a wide variety of titles - from recent AAA on the Steam Deck to really old titles that have never even been on Steam. Plus emulators for all sorts of systems - from really old up to things like GameCube/Wii or even Switch.

I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.

edit: for some more context - I have tried a linux desktop about once a year every year for the last decade. Every time I've bounced hard due to issues on a variety of hardware - intel only, intel CPU + nvidia GPU, intel CPU + AMD GPU, AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU, etc. Last year (feb 2022 or so) is the first time I've made it work for me for the long term, so maybe it's just that in that time it's finally got to a good point? :)

That bug was fixed over a year and a half ago.

Because it's not a myth for everyone?

I think issues exist on both sides, you're just picking examples that work for your argument

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