I recently built a new pc and since I switched from Windows to Lunux (Kubuntu) I got an amd gpu (6700 XT). Because people told me it is less of a hassle than Nvidia. It works fine out of the box, but the choice of drivers confuse me. For gaming is the default amdgpu good enough? Is amdgpu-pro the same as the official Radeon drivers from amd? Are they better for gaming? Is Mesa yet another driver or something in addition to a driver? Why are there no settings/gui anywhere (using the default amdgpu)?

  • heartsofwar@lemmy.world
    43·
    1 year ago

    You seem to be missing the big picture and other individuals aren’t making it clear… so here you go:

    • Kernel Drivers:
      • RADEON: The official AMD open source drivers for older cards (-GCN1.0)
      • AMDGPU: The official AMD open source drivers for newer cards (GCN1.0+)
      • AMDGPU-Pro: The official AMD closed source drivers and supports features that aren’t included in the open source driver: AMF, Vulkan (non-open-source,etc)

     

    • User Space:
      • MESA: The open source 3D OpenGL / Vulkan implementations that the Radeon / AMDGPU drivers use

     

    99.99% of the time, you will want AMDGPU and MESA

    • Sh1nyM3t4l4ss@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      You listed AMDGPU-Pro as a kernel driver. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m quite sure it is a proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan driver that uses the open source AMDGPU kernel driver.

      • heartsofwar@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        To my knowledge, you are mostly correct. The AMDGPU-Pro driver is mostly user space implementation similar to MESA, but the reason I listed it as a kernel driver is because it injects closed source binary blobs into the kernel thereby extending AMDGPU functionality and tainting it.

        ie. AMDGPU-Pro requires using DKMS or AKMOD where regular AMDGPU does not

      • heartsofwar@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yes and no.

        You need amdgpu-pro if you want AMD’s AMF hardware acceleration; otherwise, you will be relying on MESA’s open source implementation of hardware acceleration, VAAPI.

        • Lemmchen@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Oh, got it. But VA-API works fine as far as I can tell. Is there any reason I should favor AMF instead?

          • heartsofwar@lemmy.world
            4·
            1 year ago

            I have never run the amdgpu-pro driver, so I can’t say if AMD AMF is better, the same, or worse than VA-API, and I can’t find any up-to-date benchmarks… so your guess is as good as mine. I do stream my games at 1080P using amdgpu MESA VA-API, and overall I’d say the performance is not as good as Nvidia’s NVENC / NVDEC support; however, it is passable. Whether 1440 or 4k streaming is acceptable with VA-API, I don’t know…

            If I had to hazard a guess, I would say your best option is to stay with amdgpu MESA VA-API because there are tons of benchmarks for over a decade that show the open source MESA Vulkan support usually beats amdgpu-pro closed source vulkan support.