Radeon R5 240 Which Drivers For Vulkan Support Steam?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi guys!

I want to test my old GPU in GTA5. To test my R5 240 1 GB and by doing it, to help my friend with his R5 260x 2GB, which both probably share the same drivers. Not only that, but this will feed my curiosity, and he will receive my help because of my experience installing the drivers.

For now, I’ve installed all needed packages with wine and vulkan drivers, but couldn’t get Steam to run games. Steam says “no DX11 support” or that it has GPU problems.
The GLX gears are working normally and with vblank_mode=0 I have a couple of thousands FPS.

The native games like Limbo on Steam are starting, but it shows white screen after game starts.

My intuition tells me that I need older kernel and older drivers, but I’m not sure (using kernel 5 for the moment).

What should I do to run this GPU in Linux in EndeavourOS?

2

I’m not sure what graphics card you have but looks like Sea Islands. So follow the Arch Wiki here to enable support for this card.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU#Enable_Southern_Islands_(SI)_and_Sea_Islands_(CIK)_support

3

Thanks for reply.
I believe that I have

Volcanic Islands

Is it the same drivers?

I cannot find any wiki how to install those drivers. Please help.
I only found this tutorial, it mentions kernel compiling, but no instructions. Will it work on 6 kernel?

https://chifi.dev/how-to-get-vulkan-amdgpu-working-on-vi-cards-in-linux-e81e5cdd0146

4

OK, this was a solution for me:

Firstly, I’ve read this article I linked:

“This is actually a bit confusing for VI cards, as they don’t necessarily fit into the SI or CIK series of cards, but are secretly considered part of the CIK series by Linux.”

So my GPU is “secretly supported” :slight_smile: Nice Linux, nice! Hahaha! VI Means Volcanic Islands.

Then I merged these two articles from Arch Wiki and from my link (thank you, @ricklinux).
Because the article is aimed towards other distributions.

In the article there is:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub/grub.cfg

But on EndeavourOS and Arch Linux there is no such file. So I edited:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub

And added parameters from the article (not from Arch Wiki).
radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1

Between the quotes:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1"

In my case, it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 nowatchdog nvme_load=YES amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff cpufreq.default_governor=performance radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1"

Then from Arch Wiki created and edited this file:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf

And inside it looks like this:

blacklist radeon
options radeon si_support=0
options radeon cik_support=0

Then edited another file from Arch Wiki:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/amdgpu.conf

Inside, it looks like this:

#blacklist amd gpu
#blacklist amdgpu
blacklist radeon

options amdgpu si_support=1
options amdgpu cik_support=1

Then, generated grub config, but first made a backup:
mv /boot/grub/grub.cfg /boot/grub/grub.cfg.bak

So, after that:
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Restart and it works!

Played GTA5 already and now will be testing The Witcher 3 :slight_smile:

Also, played CS:GO firstly to test vulkan with -vulkan parameter in launch options.

Long before that, I installed those packages:
sudo pacman -S --needed lib32-mesa vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader xf86-video-amdgpu

And that’s all! I hope that it will help somebody in the future to install and play on the older GPU :slight_smile:

My kernel is:

uname -r
6.0.1-270-tkg-pds

So it should work on the standalone EndeavourOS kernel as well.

5

Okay…glad i was able to help you get there. Yes some of the earlier Radeon cards are hard to decipher but there is a list.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon