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.
Try out COSMIC with the NVIDIA 550 beta driver.
No. I‘m not being dictated by my gpu what OS I can use.
Nvidia is just shit.
The guy that’s shilling out cosmic DE is also a lead developer in the company making it lmfao
Self shill lol
Yo… good eye. I cant believe how many people are just plain manipulative.
Then have fun with your bad experience. NVIDIA is working quite well in Wayland on COSMIC.
No I wont. I‘ll just sell the gpu at some point.
Great that it works well on COSMIC. They don’t want to use COSMIC and that’s their choice. You don’t have to be so salty about it.
What makes you think I’m “salty”? I’m not the one complaining about NVIDIA not working in Wayland, or saying that I’m going to sell my GPU.
The only person who is salty is the one who would rather sell their GPU than use a Wayland desktop environment that supports NVIDIA as a first class citizen.
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.
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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).
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.
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.
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)
I couldn’t get my 6900XT to drive my G9 at 240Hz, but 120 isn’t too bad. I should probably try again soon.
Been 20+yrs of some random flavor of driver problems for me, since my 9700 Pro at the very least.
Over DisplayPort? That’s interesting, I knew AMD can’t do HDMI 2.0 but there shouldn’t be a problem with DP.
Might wanna try a proper new certified DP 2.1 cable, just to be safe.
I “only” drive a AW3423DW but no issues at 3440x1440 with 165Hz.
Indeed over DP. It works fine at 240Hz in Windows, but of course the graphics quality in games is not as good as with nvidia.
Anything interesting going on in the kernel log while connection doesn’t work?
If so, you could maybe write a bug report at the amdgpu repo.
One thing I could imagine that is happening is that Linux chooses a higher chroma subsampling than on Windows. Had that issue before with a monitor that had a wrong EDID. Unfortunately it’s a real pain to set the chroma subsampling on Linux with AMD.
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 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.
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.
I have the same problem with the LTS kernel. Just tried. First time it booted but locked up on shutdown. The next cold boot it immediately went to black screen after loading amdgpu. (
[drm:amdgpu_gfx_enable_kcq [amdgpu]] *ERROR* KCQ enable failed
). Next boot too. All with kernel 6.6.14.That’s strange, 6.6.14 is the same version that’s on Fedora currently. My friend with a 7900 XTX is still on 6.5.0 so I can’t get him to test that version right now.
Fix is merged already though: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=9c2f0338bbd132a4b12b988004d796798609d297 Should hopefully not be long before it is backported.
In the linked issue the user
uncle jack
wroteI’ve set up Fedora Workstation 39 with hibernate to rule out potential issues caused by my current system. Rebooting from Linux to Linux still leads to dark boots before reaching the OS. This has kernel 6.6.12. Cold boots seem to be fine after having cut power to the PSU earlier.
So I fear that there is still a deeper issue somewhere. But I’ll see what happens after those fixes get backported to 6.7 and hit archlinux. Until then I might have to live with Windows or don’t reboot too often. I have yet to figure out how long I need to keep this machine off the power for it to behave like a cold boot. 10s apparently didn’t cut it in my latest try (it’s a new PC so I still have to learn its quirks).
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.
KDE Neon user here, I have not touched any graphics settings and my AMD card runs 32:9 120 Hz flawlessly
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?
Same issue on 6.6.14. :-(
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)
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.
the 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
At least with my 1060 compositing wasn’t an issue. But true, I rarely used Wayland. Do you have specific issues when compositing is enabled or do you just prefer the simpler rendering?
I prefer without for the aesthetics but also for functionality: compositing x11 with multi monitors of different refresh rates is still broken, everything becomes locked at 60hz instead of the max for each monitor.