Hi all,
I’ve been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It’s been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600XT used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I’ll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you
I have RX 7600 on EndeavourOS. The installation is 2 years old or so, so I don’t remember everything. Normally for gaming you don’t need any extra packages, because Mesa (which contains the Open Source AMD GPU drivers) is in the Kernel. Usually that’s all you need for gaming. However I do have installed some vulkan related packages. The package info says this is required by
steam, so you might have it already.yay -Qi vulkan-radeonto see your information about the current installed package (which tells me what installed package requires it) or lookup from repository withyay -Si vulkan-radeon. You can read more here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPUThank you. I think I already have that installed.
The open source kernel drivers will work. If you want to bother installing their proprietary drivers, I’d recommend reading the Arch Wiki, but you may need to do some things differently even though EndeavorOS is Arch-based.
From the wiki: “Most users do not need these proprietary drivers.”
Most people will tell you there is no difference between AMDVLK drivers and RADV but clearly there is since RADV is what Valve uses for the Steam Deck. Heres a great video comparing the three options AMD has for linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAIzRlhvijU
I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers. Do not use AMDGPU-PRO ever though.
I think RADV is what I’m using. I’ll have to double check, as it’s been a long time since messing with the drivers.
I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers.
RADV is the open-source community developed Vulkan driver. It has the widest hardware support of the three Vulkan drivers and is generally the best for gaming.
AMD provides two more Vulkan drivers - AMDVLK is the open-source one available in AMDGPU, then there’s the unnamed proprietary Vulkan driver in AMDGPU-PRO. The biggest advantage of the proprietary one is that it is certified - doesn’t matter most of the time, but when it does, a missing certification is a deal breaker.
As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros so I still think its a bit confusing to decide which to use for your needs at first unless you check the video I linked. I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.
Sidenote why cant AMDGPU and RADV combine their efforts to simplify and rename AMDGPU-PRO to AMDGPU-unfree because that itself is confusing since most people will be drawn to use the PRO version without realising the worse performance.
As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros
I really don’t think that’s the case, assuming you’re talking about AMDVLK (amdgpu is the kernel module used by all three Vulkan drivers - RADV, AMDVLK and the Vulkan driver from AMDGPU-PRO). Ubuntu and Fedora definitely default to RADV, and Arch Wiki recommends RADV unless you need something from the other drivers.
I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.
NixOS seems to default to RADV according to their Wiki. If this was a few years ago then maybe you might be confusing it with the ACO shader compiler for RADV? That brought a significant performance increase and eventually became the default in RADV. I remember using custom Mesa (the project that develops open source graphics drivers, like RADV and radeonsi) builds to massively reduce stuttering in DirectX games.
The needed drivers should be provided by the kernel, so no.
If your RX 580 works and your packages are up-to-date, I see no reason a more recent AMD card wouldn’t be plug-and-play.
Typically, no. AMD (and Intel) are generally plug and play with the same OS install. Drivers are open source and provided via Kernel and Mesa packages.
I do not use EndeavorOS so I cannot confirm if any additional packages are needed for Vulkan support. However, that wouldn’t change if you’re just upgrading from one AMD GPU to another.
Thank you.
You won’t need any additional driver, since, as you already said, it is already included in the kernel.
However, as owner of a RX6600, I can tell you that the GPU will be quite loud sometimes. I can recommend you to check out LACT, which let’s you define fan curves, which makes it A LOT less noisy.
Appreciate it. Is there a gui for LACT? (I worry so much that I’d mess things up when it’s a config file). Would you be able to share your configs?
It is GUI (for the most part, you can also modify the yml file).
