AMD GPUs are cursed for me
AMD GPUs are cursed for me
Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I also went with an AMD APU, and had driver crashes for a long time when I was in video calls and it had to decode multiple streams. That thankfully stabilized with Linux 6.4.
Since sooo many people in the community swear by AMD, I thought "dammit, let's try it again for my new desktop" and got an 7800rx ... and I have to reboot ~5 times until I finally make it to a running xserver or wayland session. Apparently I am hit by this problem (at least I hope so). But that doesn't even read nice ... the fix seems to be to revert another fix for powermanagement. So I either have a mostly non-booting card or suboptimal power management.
I start to regret having chosen AMD .... again :-/ I seem to be cursed.
This reads like an alternate reality for me. I bought a new 3060 ti and using wayland with it is nearly impossible for me. I tried in ubuntu and had tons of errors and in debian/kde it wont even login without x11 enabled.
When you go to protondb.com every game has tons of fixes for nvidia cards and every forum has fixes for nvidia cards while amd mostly works oob.
23Pretty sure the 7000 series is known to be not well supported yet since they're new and didn't have massive uptake, so I don't want to be that guy but...
Some research before hand on what GPU to get from AMD wouldn't hurt?
I've got a 6800XT and had absolutely 0 issues since I got it about a year ago. I see from your replies you're on Arch, so I guess just wait for things to improve unfortunately.
17Since people normally only report on negative experiences: I was lucky enough to get a reference AMD 6900 XT during the GPU shortages.
Switched from Ubuntu to Fedora for it because Ubuntu didn't have firmware for it yet.
Ever since then it has been a rock solid GPU. Never even had such a stable GPU under Windows.
Have been running Fedora with Wayland for more than 2 years now and can count the crashes on a single hand, most were my fault.
I'm sure once that issue is sorted out that GPU is going to ride along for years with minimal maintenance required.
(You might want to downgrade your kernel until then though)
15Yup I'm hit by the exact same bug currently. But I was able to go back to before I updated with Snapper and now I'll wait until the fix is in the Tumbleweed repos.
But other than that I'm much happier with the AMD than with my Nvidia (on Linux that is). VRR with Wayland on multiple monitors just works without issues. And before this week I never had any issues at all with the 7800XT.
13Funnily, I only run AMD now for the same reasons, except with Nvidia as the PITA. Always ongoing driver issues, power management or fans running like jet turbines.... Last 3 machines AMD, no issues with the GPU's/drivers.
11On EndeavorOS I haven’t had issues with a Vega64 and now with a 6800XT. I followed the AMD Gpu guides from Arch wiki to get everything up and running but that was back when I started the build with the Vega 64. After the upgrade I didn’t even need to touch anything and all non anti-cheat games work quite well. Maybe I got lucky though.
10I just got a 7600XT. My only complaint is that it isn’t pushing quite enough frames so I would need something more beefy, but then I will also lose GSync because of my monitors so I will probably simply return it and go back to the 3080. Lower TDP and thermals was quite nice though and wayland was much less buggy. No crashes, I’m on ubuntu tho.
7I had a rock solid AMD RX 580 up until the release of kernel version 6.7. Now I'm lucky to get a system that can remain up for longer than thirty minutes. Sticking to 6.6 has worked for me and definitely something you should try as well, but it's worth noting that any amount of time spent on the issue tracker for AMD GPU stuff will reveal tons of issues from 6.6 as well.
6I have a similar story with an RX580, I replaced my GTX 1060 3GB for a 8GB RX 580 mostly because the 3GB of vram were an issue for BeamNG.
Now I can't record my 3 displays with the RX 580, it just fails when trying to do so, and 2 displays results in constant encoder overloads, something that the 1060 had issues at all, also my colors are off when recording and I have no idea why, it even happens when recording with the CPU:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=292196
Also kernel 6.6 broke the power reporting on all polaris GPUs, thankfully that was fixed recently in kernel 6.7.2, but holy shit it took like 6 months to fix that.
6I've always had great experiences with AMD and not Nvidia. Maybe its just there newer cards.
5Me playing with my 7900XTX no issues on Bazzite
4It also matters what Linux distro you have. Some of them are horrible. I'm super happy with amd graphics on arch, and have no issues whatsoever, with probably 30 games in steam library that all works very well.
So I think it may be your system and what drivers you installed, or some other config.
I have a 6900 XT card, latest kernel, latest drivers. But I've had this graphics card since kernel 5.8 I think, with no issues.
4KDE Neon user here, I have not touched any graphics settings and my AMD card runs 32:9 120 Hz flawlessly
3Me with a Vega 64... the forgotten platform. A few games will just straight up reset my gpu with certain instructions, taking the whole system with it. I can't even play Minecraft with a Mesa version newer than 2 years anymore due to regressions.
Good thing to know 7800 XT is also cursed though, I was planning on getting that one to escape my situation. lol.
3Run
sudo dmesg | grep amdgpuand look for errors.You may have a firmware file missing, for instance. If that’s the case, it’s an easy fix - just download the firmware files from the kernel tree and put them wherever your system wants them.
This is how I do it on Debian but it should be easy enough to adapt to whatever distribution you’re using (it might be exactly the same tbh): https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gaming#firmware
3the most bug-free gpu experience I have with Linux is Nvidia GPU + KDE X11 with compositor disabled. Pure bliss. I've had a 6700XT and it was terrible too, now I have a 4070. For my laptops, intel igpu works decently well with wayland KDE, but there are few bugs, like having to clear some apps gpucache (vscode) quite often
2Using amd GX 6600... Mostly going fine, tho I haven't tried any big heavy games. One thing tho... Everytime I turn on my computer, no display. I reboot it and then ot works fine, but ot never does the first time. One path I'll investigate is the monitor: my monitors are both older and use DVI or VGA ports, so I have to use converters. I might try and get my hand on a more recent monitor to see if I still get the same problem. But if I do, I'm not even sure where to ask. I don't even think it's a linux problem, because I tried removing my drive with linux living one with windows and the problem remains. I also was using mint when the problem started and switched to Arch (btw) since and it doesn't change a thing.
2If it makes you feel any better you're not the only one. I also have this problem. Whenever it was time to upgrade my video card I'd try Ati and later AMD and it would always have some annoying issues. Meanwhile I'm on my 7th or 8th Nvidia card over the years and they're always great.
1I've had similar issues. I don't understand the love for AMD. My whole rig is AMD, but it's constantly having GPU crashes. All games run at high FPS and my CPU temps seem nominal. But the games will crash. Everything from RimWorld to Baldurs Gate 3. They all run pinned at 60fps but randomly crash. I've tried a thousand different configurations and drivers. I've tried Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I'm now just accepting that I can't rely on it as a gaming rig. I like that AMD is trying to be progressive with open source drivers but the quality doesn't seem to be there. My next rig might be Nvidia and Intel. But we will see.
1Ohh, so that's the bug I've been experiencing ever since Fedora 39 updated to kernel 6.7. But I only get this on restarts, so cold starts work just fine. I actually have a 7800 XT as well.
But other than that I only noticed one issue: video playback in Firefox sometimes shows visual artifacts across the screen while a game is running in the background (well, with Baldur's Gate 3 at least). Fedora 39, KDE Plasma. Kernel 6.6 or 6.7 (or 6.5 for that matter). That said I also had some suboptimal experiences with browser video playback on an AMD APU notebook under Windows (severe framedrops), so I'm not sure where to point my fingers at.
Other than that it's honestly been great. I switched from Windows + Nvidia to Linux + AMD basically January 1st of this year and only ever booted Windows twice to transfer game saves over for the few games that don't have Steam Cloud.
Turns out most of the problems I had with Linux desktop was with Nvidia. I spent more time troubleshooting than actually using software. AMD isn't perfect on Linux and with new kernel versions you're suspect to run into more issues, but AMD (and Intel) mostly work out of the box.
1I don't know if you've tried it yet, but having recently installed 6.7.3 I noticed a whole lot of amdgpu fixes in the changelog. Maybe it will help?
1Extremely weird! I have and AMD 6700 XT and I have not experienced any problems. It's been smooth sailing. I run Manjaro with the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel.
1Update: today I was able to update to kernel 6.7.5 and the issue disappeared for me.
1