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.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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.
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.
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Pretty 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.
As I said... I had a lot of trouble in the past and went with nvidia most of the time. It wasn't just a quick shot picking that specific AMD card. My research ended up looking positive. The 6000 series wouldn't have cut it, since the AV1 encoder isn't good enough (or maybe not present at all; I forgot). I also buy this thing to last a few years, so having to take a card from the last generation would have certainly be the point where I just picked nvidia again.
I’ve been running a 7900XTX for months without issue. Only thing that was missing was some stuff around power setting, fan curve etc but even that I think has been fixed in recent kernels.
Since 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)
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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.
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What kernel version are you using? 6.7? Unfortunately using the latest and greatest kernel means you'll be among the first to get bitten by new bugs. Does the issue also occurs on 6.6 and 6.1?
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Funnily, 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.
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.
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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
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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.
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I 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.
I've always had great experiences with AMD and not Nvidia. Maybe its just there newer cards.
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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It 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.
I am running Arch here as well. Most people who referenced that issue I linked also seem to come from Arch. So it seems like a problem due to the "latest" kernel. I don't accept this as an excuse, though. It's still a stable kernel an I don't expect drivers to be published that were not tested in advance. And it looks like this has happened here. Maybe bad timing on my part and this was/is the only hiccup in a long time (see "cursed"), but I guess I'll find out.
Having a bleeding edge kernel can and will come back to bite you. There's a reason why many distros hold back with kernel updates for so long, there's issues that only can be found with user feedback.
From experience, "stable" in the kernel world doesn't mean much unfortunately. I encountered dozens of issues over various versions and different hardware already and it's the main reason I don't run rolling release distros on my main rig.
There's also been enough times where the latest Nvidia driver borked my test system at work so I'm fine with just not running the latest kernel instead.
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Me playing with my 7900XTX no issues on Bazzite
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 of amdgpu and firmware behavior. (IMO the hardware should not crash as hard as it does, so the firmware seems to be a bit wonky too)
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
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KDE Neon user here, I have not touched any graphics settings and my AMD card runs 32:9 120 Hz flawlessly
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