Hi all,
I’ve been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It’s been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600XT used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I’ll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you
The needed drivers should be provided by the kernel, so no.
If your RX 580 works and your packages are up-to-date, I see no reason a more recent AMD card wouldn’t be plug-and-play.
The open source kernel drivers will work. If you want to bother installing their proprietary drivers, I’d recommend reading the Arch Wiki, but you may need to do some things differently even though EndeavorOS is Arch-based.
From the wiki: “Most users do not need these proprietary drivers.”
Most people will tell you there is no difference between AMDVLK drivers and RADV but clearly there is since RADV is what Valve uses for the Steam Deck. Heres a great video comparing the three options AMD has for linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAIzRlhvijU
I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers. Do not use AMDGPU-PRO ever though.
I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers.
RADV is the open-source community developed Vulkan driver. It has the widest hardware support of the three Vulkan drivers and is generally the best for gaming.
AMD provides two more Vulkan drivers - AMDVLK is the open-source one available in AMDGPU, then there’s the unnamed proprietary Vulkan driver in AMDGPU-PRO. The biggest advantage of the proprietary one is that it is certified - doesn’t matter most of the time, but when it does, a missing certification is a deal breaker.
As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros so I still think its a bit confusing to decide which to use for your needs at first unless you check the video I linked. I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.
Sidenote why cant AMDGPU and RADV combine their efforts to simplify and rename AMDGPU-PRO to AMDGPU-unfree because that itself is confusing since most people will be drawn to use the PRO version without realising the worse performance.
I have RX 7600 on EndeavourOS. The installation is 2 years old or so, so I don’t remember everything. Normally for gaming you don’t need any extra packages, because Mesa (which contains the Open Source AMD GPU drivers) is in the Kernel. Usually that’s all you need for gaming. However I do have installed some vulkan related packages. The package info says this is required by
steam, so you might have it already.yay -Qi vulkan-radeonto see your information about the current installed package (which tells me what installed package requires it) or lookup from repository withyay -Si vulkan-radeon. You can read more here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPUTypically, no. AMD (and Intel) are generally plug and play with the same OS install. Drivers are open source and provided via Kernel and Mesa packages.
I do not use EndeavorOS so I cannot confirm if any additional packages are needed for Vulkan support. However, that wouldn’t change if you’re just upgrading from one AMD GPU to another.
Thank you.
