Steam installed with amdvlk, how to switch to RADV?

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Good evening :slight_smile:
I recently installed EOS and as one of the main usages for me is gaming - quite quickly installed Steam as well.
Being a noob and following guides rather quickly than carefully I opted for the ‘amdvlk’ drivers. It was the first option, it said AMD… felt just easy to choose.

Now it looks like RADV would have been the smarter/better option.
My question now is… is there a way to change the driver for the Steam installation -
and how would I do that?

Thanks for your support, as searching the web yields a ton of results, none fitting like 100%. :sweat_smile:

I found this reddit post, but it’s not like 100% clear for me right away

Hardware:
9800X3D
B650E board
6900 XT

2

As far as I can understand and know, RADV and AMD’s own, free, Vulkan driver implementation are basically interchangeable. It is recommended you try out RADV and switch to AMD’s drivers if something doesn’t work as right. If you don’t have problems with games, you don’t need to change. If you do, however, I would do the following steps:

  1. Update the system. I imagine you would know by now, but just to recap, issuing in the console sudo pacman -Syu updates the system. In the case of EndeavourOS, yay does the same thing and also updates AUR packages if you have any;
  2. Remove amdvlk. I would recommend you issue pacman -Qs amdvlk and delete everything that has amdvlk in its name;
  3. Install the RADV drivers. You do this with sudo pacman -S vulkan-radeon lib32-vulkan-radeon.
  4. Reboot. Just be safe. systemctl reboot should do the trick;
  5. You’re done. Now, things should be going with RADV’s implementation after the reboot.
1 Like
3

Thanks a lot! :slight_smile:
And yes, so far I was just using yay to update.

4

So I wasn’t sure what you mean by remove, so I tried
sudo pacman -Rn amdvlk (and forgot about lib32-amdvlk at that point in time).
That wasn’t working as Steam has a dependency on that.

So I thought screw it, uninstalled Steam, uninstalled amdvlk
And reinstalled Steam choosing vulkan-radeon instead of amdvlk.

And then did all of that again as I forgot lib32-amdvlk.
So right now it should be running with RADV - and the best thing, which I wasn’t sure of
it didn’t remove any of the installed games, profile, etc. :slight_smile:

5

In general, configuration files aren’t deleted by issuing a remove command from pacman, at least in my experience.

6

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