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.
And here I am with a 3090 having more issues than I have time for wishing I went with an AMD card. Sadly we both can see grass ain’t necessarily greener.
Thanks for that perspective. At least that makes me regret my decision less.
I’ve tried the open source drivers, the proprietary dkms variant, and standard proprietary drivers and all give me issues.
What kind of issues do you get? Generic instability?
Wow, I can’t believe I missed your response. Sorry for such a late reply.
General instability, absolutely. Multi display issues. And seemingly no matter what I do Wayland on KDE is basically unusable for me.
Ah, I can relate then. I drove my previous NVidia also on X11, with only occasional experiments into Wayland. Since X11 was good enough for me, I wasn’t too sad about this.
Even with X11 I have had nothing but instability sadly.
I wanted to switch to Arch like I did for my laptop, but the cons outweighed the pros ultimately for me.
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FYI Fedora 39 pushed 6.7.3 a few days ago and this issue is still unpatched.
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I did live like this with all my intel/nvidia systems just fine, though. If AMD tends to have bugs like this, they still seem to suffer from the same shitty software development attitude as they did back in the fglrx days… with the added advantage that people from the community can now firefight some of the problems. For a product I paid a few hundred euros for I expect some quality assurance for its driver development - that seems to work with nvidia.
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Bro the more popular user space driver isn’t even maintained by AMD at all. I would not be suprised if you tell me you are using amdvlk.
If only I would make it to userspace. Typically
amdgpu
dies right when loaded (so during initramfs).
Yup 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.
I need to give the LTS kernel a shot tomorrow, but I could swear I tried that and had the same issue. Which now makes me fear that I might have a different problem. Argh.
Dammit, same symptoms. Which, I guess, is not a good sign. Maybe my issue is different or I have another issue on top.
On 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.
Sorry to hear that. For what it’s worth, I’ve had no problems with integrated AMD graphics, so maybe it’s a PCIe issue?
Hmm, interesting idea. I need to investigate that. The dmesg output is full of amdgpu irq errors, but of course that could also happen with an issue on the board.
I would rule out a generic hardware issue, since 1) I get graphics during boot up until it needs to do a modeswitch (I guess) and b) it works fine so far on Windows.
I did have a similar issue after the first boot on Windows as well and assumed so far that the modeswitch after the initial driver install caused the problem. But Windows likely also installed chipset drivers at that time, so PCIe could be a possibility. Then again… I know that Windows reloads graphics drivers on-the-fly… but chipset drivers? Probably not. Which would speak against that theory.
I have no clue how Linux initiates the communication with a PCIe board, and whether the amdgpu driver would take care of that. But hardware excluded, some misconfiguration on the driver’s part could be present. Good luck!
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I 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.
I probably shouldn’t have read tests and forums, but simply searched for crashes and open bugs to get a feeling for what I am getting into. Then again I also read from people with very ugly problems with nvidia, so it’s not a really good measure.
I really want AMD to be good; they offer more VRAM where nvidia always seems to cheap out in pretty suspicious ways. Then again nvidia seems to be more power efficient.
My time with nvidia on linux was 0 issues in performance or usability.
The only sort of issue that I had was that the GTX 1060 drew 20W at idle when using the 3 displays, this was a bug that nvidia fixed for the RTX 20 series and newer cards but never fixed for pascal lol.
But even on BeamNG, there was a period were the native linux version didn’t work on mesa while it worked for nvidia, now to be fair with amd this was because the vulkan implementation of beamng is horrible and right now it does not work on either lol.
It could be your monitor or even monitor cable. I have this monitor which absolutely fucking refuses to work with AMD oved HDMI. If you have inexplicable system sleep issues, black screen issues, startup issues, etc. It could be the monitor at fault
Thanks for the suggestion!
While it’s a possibility, I think it’s unlikely, since the machine works fine with Windows. I also compiled the tkg 6.7.2 kernel which includes the revert-patch for the offending change and so far the machine booted three times without issues, so it seems to fit.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility of display issues tho, back when I had the faulty monitor it was much more severe under Linux, I never managed to track it down tho (using AMD hardware for over 10 years now, this one issue busted my nuts pretty hard)
If you have a TV or something, at least try it to rule out possible outside factors
It can’t hurt. I’ll grab another display and another cable and try a few combinations. Thanks!
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I 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.
The 3080 has ass performance on Wayland
My favorite bug is when I resume from suspend and everything becomes rainbow colored.
Same but with a Vega APU, also love it when it merges the console screen with whatever was on there bufore suspend and it’s just a text graphics rainbow mess
Nvidia by default does not preserve video memory when you suspend.
Relatively easy to fix if you follow arch wiki.
Blah, I kinda tried, but no dice yet, only managed to stop my suspend from working. I have modprobe/nvidia.conf and with the tmpfile option, updated initramfs, added the services… but only my monitors turn off. I can probably live without it for now though.
I use an AMD 7900rx with an AMD 7950x processor since almost a year with Gnome / Wayland on Arch. No problems up to now. Yes, I am a gamer too.
As others said it depends on the distribution you use.
Arch is not exactly homogeneous. Which Kernel package and version do you use? Which firmware package and version?
I use Arch, btw, and have these issues with default kernel 6.7.2, 6.7.3 and lts kernel 6.6.14. Firmware package seems to be from 2024-01-15, IIRC.
oh man, reading the comments fill me with fear, as I just ordered a new computer after stretching my old laptop for 8 years or so. I was super close to getting an AMD but went with Nvidia in the end… but so much bad juju in the comments for Nvidia too…
You may wish to pick a distro that makes a point of nvidia compatibility.
I use nobara, who have a few options in the welcome script specifically to improve compatibility with nvidia. I’ve specifically heard popOS mentioned several times as one people have liked with nvidia as well.
Some only ship with or distribute alternative open source nvidia drivers that tank performance.
Thanks for the advice, but a distro change for me would be a huge annoyance. I haven’t have issues with my laptop’s 1060 nvidia on Arch, and never had issues with the proprietary driver.
My worry is that even though mature GPU are probably well supported, I bought a relatively new one (4070 super ti) so maybe the new models have some issues due to having more features/being more extreme. Most complains here are about 30/40 models after all.
Yeah, until this thread I was convinced I should stay away from nvidia GPUs when building a new PC with Linux in mind, but I’m not so sure anymore.
RX 6700 XT here… once I refreshed the thermal pads and the thermal paste, it works great in Windows and Linuxes… Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Bazzite (Immutable Fedora but for gaming), it had no issues with the amdgpu driver builtin on any of them.
It’s a completely new card, so I will not fiddle around with it. Also it runs almost flawless on Windows (aside from a similar crash on the very first boot during driver install).
Me playing with my 7900XTX no issues on Bazzite
Me 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.
Kinda weird, is the first gen Vega Apu different enough to not have these problems? Cause I’ve been pushing that thing hard enough it’s starting to have actual hardware faults, very rarely had software related crashes that couldn’t be resolved with a temporary kernal rollback
My PC mysteriously reset itself every now and then, and I got Vega 64. Is it because of that?
Run
sudo dmesg | grep amdgpu
and 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
Thanks for the idea!
dmesg
shows the same errors as in the referenced bug ticket. So I don’t think missing firmware is the issue. I would not be surprised however, if the problem in general is a combination ofamdgpu
and firmware behavior. (IMO the hardware should not crash as hard as it does, so the firmware seems to be a bit wonky too)
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I had a similar problem which was resolved by disabling the motherboard integrated graphics in bios settings.
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Mine went back to no display only on boot, so I guess it didnt work for me either :( good luck tho!!
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…unfortunately no… I work around it by knowing what buttons to press but it’s pretty stupid.
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