I installed endeavor onto a computer with an RX 5700XT and amdgpu was installed by default. However, I want to use this pc to play VR games with steamvr and the support page heavily recommends removing amd any drivers and using mesa instead. The problem is that I can’t find any clear guides for how to accomplish removing amdgpu and setting mesa as the driver, or I’m not looking in the right places. I can see with pacman -Q that mesa is installed but I need help having it changed to the driver being used and remove amdgpu from the system. If there is a way for me to not have amdgpu installed during the os install then I’m fine with doing that, since this is a fresh install anyway.
SteamVR is not maintained at all, to my knowledge. In general, VR gaming on Linux is not very good, again, to my knowledge.
By the way, the way you install AMDGPU is through Mesa on Arch, so you can’t uninstall it without uninstalling your drivers entirely.
SteamVR is not maintained at all, to my knowledge. In general, VR gaming on Linux is not very good, again, to my knowledge.
There is plenty of recent positive posts on protondb for vr games (especially from arch users) so I think it’s in a better state then that, especially with custom versions of proton.
By the way, the way you install AMDGPU is through Mesa on Arch, so you can’t uninstall it without uninstalling your drivers entirely.
So you are saying I should go with the reinstall route? I can see that mesa is installed with pacman -Q so can I just remove amdgpu and be good to go?
I’m saying you very likely are already set up. From the Arch Wiki install guide for AMD drivers, you need to install mesa.
Yes but the driver that is actually running is amdgpu
lspci -n -n -k | grep -A 2 -e VGA -e 3D
09:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT] [1002:731f] (rev c1)
Subsystem: Sapphire Technology Limited Device [1da2:e426]
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
So how do I get rid of amdgpu and just use mesa? Or am I just daft and amdgpu is just mesa and amdgpu-pro is the proprietary driver?
No, not really. There is some key difference between the two.
AMDGPU is low-level kernel driver managing hardware. It is already in the kernel and directly interfaces with the GPU hardware.
Mesa, on the other hand, is user-space library providing API implementations (OpenGL, Vulkan). It Interfaces with applications and translates their requests into commands for the AMDGPU driver.
So, AMDGPU is crucial for hardware management at the kernel level, while Mesa provides the necessary user-space libraries to enable applications to utilize that hardware effectively.
I am not sure if that is feasible at all or advisable.
The AMDGPU driver operates at the kernel level and is essential for managing the hardware of AMD GPUs. Mesa, which provides user-space libraries for OpenGL and Vulkan, relies on the AMDGPU driver to communicate with the GPU hardware.
Thank you both for putting up with my idiocy. After doing some more searching I discovered I had to be using x11 instead of wayland, switch to vulkan-radeon insead of amdvlk, and make sure the DP is plugged in all the way