AMD Newbie: What do I need to have installed properly?

General system Newbie
1

Hey All,

I’m about to make a jump from an old Nvidia card to an AMD card soon, I see that EOS comes installed by default with:

mesa 22.2.3-1
mesa-utils 8.5.0-2
lib32-mesa

I was wondering if this is enough and what is expected, for context I’m a huge steam gamer and Linux is my primary desktop for gaming, I’ve been using Nvidia drivers for a long time and it’s always been install and go.

Others have mentioned that I might need xf86-video-amdgpu. I’ll admit I’m a little confused from reading comments on this topic on Reddit and other forums for other Distros and while usually the archwiki seems to be able to answer everything for me, I’m genuinely a little stumped and nervous changing the way I set up my Linux computers which always involved installing Nvidia, but I’m excited about an nvidia-driver free future.
I also assume that I’d need one of the vulkan drivers vulkan-radeon

I’d appreciate any help any advice, thank you.

2

Which AMD card?

3

Hey, thank you for replying so soon,

I’m jumping to a 7900 XT.

4

Required Packages: linux-firmware with the 20221214 update (not yet in repositories)
Kernel 6.0 or 6.1 (the later is in testing already) and mesa 22.2 or 22.3 or later (22.3 is in testing already)
xf86-video-amdgpu as modesetting does not support all features.

Optional packages: vulkan-radeon and lib32-vulkan-radeon and even more optionally vulkan-mesa-layers and lib32-vulkan-mesa-layers - you can install those later on.
If you want to use OpenCL, you need opencl-amd from the AUR.

3 Likes
5

Thank you, I’ll give it a shot this weekend :slight_smile:

6

If you want to optimize you card a little —> corectrl

1 Like
7

the necessary firmware is in testing repository at the moment

8

Good to know, thanks!

9

What is the typical wait time for linux-firmware to exit testing?

10

depends heavily on the maintainer.
It is ok to take the relevant firmware packages for your system from testing. At the moment none of the changes has breaking changes compared to stable.

11

Thanks, I’ve gotten everything but the Linux firmware figured out, trying to research on how to safely update it. Can’t seem to find it in the Arch Wiki.

12

In order to install the firmware if it is in testing you first have to enable the testing repo. Once enabled you can install the specific firmware that is in the testing repo that you want by just using pacman to install the specific firmware package. You don’t want to update otherwise you will get all of the packages that are in testing that are relevant for your system. Once you install the specific firmware package you can just disable the testing repo again. To enable the testing repo you just uncomment the two lines in /etc/pacman.conf for the testing repo. Then comment them out after you install the firmware package you want that is in testing.

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That was ridiculously painless for my first time enabling the test repo.

I assume that when the official branch catches up, updates will replace the test firmware just fine?

Last question I think I have, what’s the safest way of removing all the Nvidia packages?

14

Yes it wiil catch up as you put it when the packages are out of testing. If you run an update it will just inform you that a specific package is newer than what is released.

As for the nvidia. What are you trying to do? You had an nvidia card previously and you replaced it with the AMD graphics card and now you want to remove the nvidia drivers?

15

I already see the notice about the newer package. Yeah, I’m removing the Nvidia card and slotting in the AMD card.

16

What does this show?

pacman -Q | grep nvidia

I think you can use nvidia-inst -n which would remove nvidia drivers and replace with nouveau open source.

17 
lib32-nvidia-utils 525.60.11-1
nvidia-dkms 525.60.11-1
nvidia-hook 1.0-1
nvidia-inst 1.8-1
nvidia-installer-common 1.7-2
nvidia-settings 525.60.11-2
nvidia-utils 525.60.11-1

That’s the output. I can try nvidia-inst -n

18

Yes, it seems like that will remove everything but installer common.

Do I need to have Nouveau installed for the AMD card?

19

I’m not sure but i don’t think it will hurt. Not sure if it’s just a module that loads if required. The new AMD card should run on amdgpu.

1 Like
20

Nouveau is for Nvidia, and it is the module that comes with the kernel.
But it shouldn’t hurt even when you have the AMD GPU installed. And you can blacklist nouveau if you want.

Edit: you can uninstall any package starting with nvidia when you are using the AMD GPU.