Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I also went with an AMD APU, and had driver crashes for a long time when I was in video calls and it had to decode multiple streams. That thankfully stabilized with Linux 6.4.
Since sooo many people in the community swear by AMD, I thought “dammit, let’s try it again for my new desktop” and got an 7800rx … and I have to reboot ~5 times until I finally make it to a running xserver or wayland session. Apparently I am hit by this problem (at least I hope so). But that doesn’t even read nice … the fix seems to be to revert another fix for powermanagement. So I either have a mostly non-booting card or suboptimal power management.
I start to regret having chosen AMD … again :-/ I seem to be cursed.
And here I am with a 3090 having more issues than I have time for wishing I went with an AMD card. Sadly we both can see grass ain’t necessarily greener.
Thanks for that perspective. At least that makes me regret my decision less.
I’ve tried the open source drivers, the proprietary dkms variant, and standard proprietary drivers and all give me issues.
What kind of issues do you get? Generic instability?
Wow, I can’t believe I missed your response. Sorry for such a late reply.
General instability, absolutely. Multi display issues. And seemingly no matter what I do Wayland on KDE is basically unusable for me.
Ah, I can relate then. I drove my previous NVidia also on X11, with only occasional experiments into Wayland. Since X11 was good enough for me, I wasn’t too sad about this.
Even with X11 I have had nothing but instability sadly.
I wanted to switch to Arch like I did for my laptop, but the cons outweighed the pros ultimately for me.
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FYI Fedora 39 pushed 6.7.3 a few days ago and this issue is still unpatched.
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I did live like this with all my intel/nvidia systems just fine, though. If AMD tends to have bugs like this, they still seem to suffer from the same shitty software development attitude as they did back in the fglrx days… with the added advantage that people from the community can now firefight some of the problems. For a product I paid a few hundred euros for I expect some quality assurance for its driver development - that seems to work with nvidia.
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Pretty sure the 7000 series is known to be not well supported yet since they’re new and didn’t have massive uptake, so I don’t want to be that guy but…
Some research before hand on what GPU to get from AMD wouldn’t hurt?
I’ve got a 6800XT and had absolutely 0 issues since I got it about a year ago. I see from your replies you’re on Arch, so I guess just wait for things to improve unfortunately.
As I said… I had a lot of trouble in the past and went with nvidia most of the time. It wasn’t just a quick shot picking that specific AMD card. My research ended up looking positive. The 6000 series wouldn’t have cut it, since the AV1 encoder isn’t good enough (or maybe not present at all; I forgot). I also buy this thing to last a few years, so having to take a card from the last generation would have certainly be the point where I just picked nvidia again.
I’ve been running a 7900XTX for months without issue. Only thing that was missing was some stuff around power setting, fan curve etc but even that I think has been fixed in recent kernels.
On EndeavorOS I haven’t had issues with a Vega64 and now with a 6800XT. I followed the AMD Gpu guides from Arch wiki to get everything up and running but that was back when I started the build with the Vega 64. After the upgrade I didn’t even need to touch anything and all non anti-cheat games work quite well. Maybe I got lucky though.
Sorry to hear that. For what it’s worth, I’ve had no problems with integrated AMD graphics, so maybe it’s a PCIe issue?
Hmm, interesting idea. I need to investigate that. The dmesg output is full of amdgpu irq errors, but of course that could also happen with an issue on the board.
I would rule out a generic hardware issue, since 1) I get graphics during boot up until it needs to do a modeswitch (I guess) and b) it works fine so far on Windows.
I did have a similar issue after the first boot on Windows as well and assumed so far that the modeswitch after the initial driver install caused the problem. But Windows likely also installed chipset drivers at that time, so PCIe could be a possibility. Then again… I know that Windows reloads graphics drivers on-the-fly… but chipset drivers? Probably not. Which would speak against that theory.
I have no clue how Linux initiates the communication with a PCIe board, and whether the amdgpu driver would take care of that. But hardware excluded, some misconfiguration on the driver’s part could be present. Good luck!
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I just got a 7600XT. My only complaint is that it isn’t pushing quite enough frames so I would need something more beefy, but then I will also lose GSync because of my monitors so I will probably simply return it and go back to the 3080. Lower TDP and thermals was quite nice though and wayland was much less buggy. No crashes, I’m on ubuntu tho.
The 3080 has ass performance on Wayland
My favorite bug is when I resume from suspend and everything becomes rainbow colored.
Nvidia by default does not preserve video memory when you suspend.
Relatively easy to fix if you follow arch wiki.
Blah, I kinda tried, but no dice yet, only managed to stop my suspend from working. I have modprobe/nvidia.conf and with the tmpfile option, updated initramfs, added the services… but only my monitors turn off. I can probably live without it for now though.
It could be your monitor or even monitor cable. I have this monitor which absolutely fucking refuses to work with AMD oved HDMI. If you have inexplicable system sleep issues, black screen issues, startup issues, etc. It could be the monitor at fault
Thanks for the suggestion!
While it’s a possibility, I think it’s unlikely, since the machine works fine with Windows. I also compiled the tkg 6.7.2 kernel which includes the revert-patch for the offending change and so far the machine booted three times without issues, so it seems to fit.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility of display issues tho, back when I had the faulty monitor it was much more severe under Linux, I never managed to track it down tho (using AMD hardware for over 10 years now, this one issue busted my nuts pretty hard)
If you have a TV or something, at least try it to rule out possible outside factors
It can’t hurt. I’ll grab another display and another cable and try a few combinations. Thanks!
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I have a similar story with an RX580, I replaced my GTX 1060 3GB for a 8GB RX 580 mostly because the 3GB of vram were an issue for BeamNG.
Now I can’t record my 3 displays with the RX 580, it just fails when trying to do so, and 2 displays results in constant encoder overloads, something that the 1060 had issues at all, also my colors are off when recording and I have no idea why, it even happens when recording with the CPU:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=292196
Also kernel 6.6 broke the power reporting on all polaris GPUs, thankfully that was fixed recently in kernel 6.7.2, but holy shit it took like 6 months to fix that.
I probably shouldn’t have read tests and forums, but simply searched for crashes and open bugs to get a feeling for what I am getting into. Then again I also read from people with very ugly problems with nvidia, so it’s not a really good measure.
I really want AMD to be good; they offer more VRAM where nvidia always seems to cheap out in pretty suspicious ways. Then again nvidia seems to be more power efficient.
My time with nvidia on linux was 0 issues in performance or usability.
The only sort of issue that I had was that the GTX 1060 drew 20W at idle when using the 3 displays, this was a bug that nvidia fixed for the RTX 20 series and newer cards but never fixed for pascal lol.
But even on BeamNG, there was a period were the native linux version didn’t work on mesa while it worked for nvidia, now to be fair with amd this was because the vulkan implementation of beamng is horrible and right now it does not work on either lol.
RX 6700 XT here… once I refreshed the thermal pads and the thermal paste, it works great in Windows and Linuxes… Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Bazzite (Immutable Fedora but for gaming), it had no issues with the amdgpu driver builtin on any of them.
It’s a completely new card, so I will not fiddle around with it. Also it runs almost flawless on Windows (aside from a similar crash on the very first boot during driver install).
oh man, reading the comments fill me with fear, as I just ordered a new computer after stretching my old laptop for 8 years or so. I was super close to getting an AMD but went with Nvidia in the end… but so much bad juju in the comments for Nvidia too…
I use an AMD 7900rx with an AMD 7950x processor since almost a year with Gnome / Wayland on Arch. No problems up to now. Yes, I am a gamer too.
As others said it depends on the distribution you use.
Arch is not exactly homogeneous. Which Kernel package and version do you use? Which firmware package and version?
I use Arch, btw, and have these issues with default kernel 6.7.2, 6.7.3 and lts kernel 6.6.14. Firmware package seems to be from 2024-01-15, IIRC.
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Arch (btw)
Using amd GX 6600… Mostly going fine, tho I haven’t tried any big heavy games. One thing tho… Everytime I turn on my computer, no display. I reboot it and then ot works fine, but ot never does the first time. One path I’ll investigate is the monitor: my monitors are both older and use DVI or VGA ports, so I have to use converters. I might try and get my hand on a more recent monitor to see if I still get the same problem. But if I do, I’m not even sure where to ask. I don’t even think it’s a linux problem, because I tried removing my drive with linux living one with windows and the problem remains. I also was using mint when the problem started and switched to Arch (btw) since and it doesn’t change a thing.
I had a similar problem which was resolved by disabling the motherboard integrated graphics in bios settings.
Thank you ! It didn’t seem to work on it’s own, but I also noticed I wasn’t booting in EFI mode, so maybe if I just change my booting partition and combine it with your advice it’ll work…
Mine went back to no display only on boot, so I guess it didnt work for me either :( good luck tho!!
Aw, too bad :( Good luck to you as well, tho! I’ve bookmarked your comment, so I’ll be back to tell you if I find the solution, however long it takes!
I still haven’t found the solution, have you had any luck with yours?
I tried switching every UEFI setting that seemed to have something to do with booting or gpus, reinstalled gpu bios, upgrading mobo bios, getting a monitor I could plug without a switch… All to no avail.
Well, I think before upgrading the BIOS, one thing had a slightly different result: Setting the boot mode to UEFI and disabling CSM made it display “no gop (graphic output protocol)” after a few minutes, and it offered to either take me to the uefi settings or loading defaults (which implied going back to CSM), after which it boot this time go back to doing the same thing.
I don’t think I’ve had this error since the mobo bios upgrade, but still no display unless I reboot, unless the computer had been turned in until recently. I’m kinda out of ideas…
…unfortunately no… I work around it by knowing what buttons to press but it’s pretty stupid.
Me playing with my 7900XTX no issues on Bazzite
KDE Neon user here, I have not touched any graphics settings and my AMD card runs 32:9 120 Hz flawlessly
