Contrary to popular beliefs - i’m not terminator or even Wine-guru
So i need some help to determine best advises for Linux gaming guide in certain areas or hardware or drivers that i personally doesn’t have any experience at all.
AMD Drivers
AMD RADV open (part of Mesa project)
vulkan-radeon
lib32-vulkan-radeon
AMD AMDVLK open (maintained by AMD)
amdvlk
lib32-amdvlk
AMD AMDGPU PRO closed (maintained by AMD)
vulkan-amdgpu-pro
lib32-vulkan-amdgpu-pro
Please vote for your experience with those 3 AMD drivers and leave some comments on good / bad / ugly and things that everyone should know, and also mention which specific GPU(s) you’ve tried it on.
well, my personal track record is way better with radv (vulkan-radeon).
I tend do try AMDVLK from time to time, but it always has worse performance on my end and some games don’t even run with AMDVLK.
That’s actually not really surprising. Valve, Mesa and other developers work on RADV and also take the good parts from AMDVLK, while AMDVLK, although open, is only worked on by AMD and doesn’t usually get the benefits developed by Valve, Mesa and others.
For AMDGPU-Pro - it’s closed, never tried it, never will try it. It is aimed for Ubuntu LTS/RHEL where the distribution packages don’t support driver updates but new stuff still has to work, no matter how.
RADV has been the go-to choice for gaming without Raytracing.
If you wish to use Raytracing, most games will simply crash as soon as you turn RT on. However AMDGPU PRO is supposed to be best when it comes to Raytracing performance atm.
That being said, I would still go for RADV every single time.
Very interesting, i wonder by Ray Tracing you mean some form of NoVidya RTX calls translations or some games are already made to work with AMD solution?
The thing is that those benchmarks were mainly done on Windows.
On Linux performance is worse
Especially with Intel GPU’s. They still run very badly on Linux.
I had only good experience with RADV. I did use AMDVLK, the free version, for a while, and it was fine, too, for the most part.
If I had any interest in proprietary drivers, I’d just use NoVidea. It’s better hardware, anyway, I just hate the fact the drivers are proprietary, and all the problems that come with that. I aslo hate giving my hard earned fiat currency to a company that treats Linux as second class OS. That’s why I use AMD and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, not because I particularly like AMD.
While I don’t game on AMD hardware, I told many people to uninstall amdvlk because their games were not running, and suddenly things started working. So I voted Mesa for stablity and compatibility but I don’t know about performance. amdvlk is like cancer, it will take over any other driver even if you don’t have an AMD GPU.
As someone who just bought a new AMD card, and as someone who never used AMD graphics on linux before (Thank God I finally got away from Nvidia)… RADV all the way. I actually couldn’t get any games to launch on AMDVLK which surprised me because I thought it would support this card better!
