Evening folks.

My 6 year old son has decided he would like to play games on my Computer, Not to bad as I am working most of the day anyway, but I didn't want to install Windows as I only have 1 SSD in the computer and its a relatively small one at that.

So as of the past month or so I have had multi-lib installed on current, not really being used at all as everything I use Slackware for runs 64 bit just fine, except for now.
Managing to Install steam fine, and configure the Nintendo Switch pro controller fine also, but Imagine my surprise when erm "Lego Cities" << Kids choice, work out the box without any configuring, well this is amazing even for me. For years ive always thought of Linux and decent gaming just dont mix hence why I have never bothered

So my question "finally"

I have an RX580 with what ever default graphics driver is installed on Current, Is their a gain to be had by installing Propriety?

I'd tend to say if it works, leave it well alone, but My daughters are also intrigued by steam, and fingers are being pointed at potential games to download and install. I am trying to go by what ever Protondb suggest works, I am not interested in Amazing graphics, but just prefer to have things working smoothly.

Lego cities so far produces a nice 60FPS and TBH its all i really ask for. But I must admit, I am also looking at games for myself i.e. Cities Skyline etc

Hey, congratulations!

My understanding is that the open source AMD drivers are the best AMD drivers.

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No, like dugan said if you have AMD, use the free drivers in mesa.

Nice, prOxibus. I've been gaming on Slackware for a very long time, albeit with Nvidia blobs, and Slackware makes for a fine gaming box IMHO. Current 4.19.x now has most of the updates needed for AMD GPU, although 5.2/3+ has updated support. The one missing feature is OpenCL (need AMDGPU-Pro), but that's for number crunching and not so much for gaming.

AMD pushed a lot of updates to mesa and the kernel to get RX series GPU and newer running on Linux. I'm excited about the possibility of my dropping Nvidia for AMD Navi GPU next year.

On Steam you shold keep an eye oen for the linux native games, not just Proton capable (I've had decent it a bit mixed results). Also, don't forget humble bunble and GOG.com.

2 members found this post helpful.

This is not entirely correct, AMD has at least some OpenCL support in mesa. I'm not sure how well it compares to AMDGPU-Pro, but it does exist.

Morning folks

Thanks for the replies.

Dugan: Thanks. So a "little" bit of research, Am I to think that proprietary would be best for the likes of erm "3D Artists, Film/Photography, Rendering" etc? No problem what so ever with Open Source drivers so I don't think I will change.

kingbeowulf: So far with Lego Cities, and a recently bought Cities: Skylines it works flawlessly. I have only really used "Humble" for Programming / Linux books, I may look into the Games, I assume it will just be keys to be inputted to steam?

The thing keeping me from Gaming so far was the "Wine" side of things as games would need to be run on different versions, and thus meant keeping different versions of the same application (just sounded convoluted to me)

Looking into the Gaming side more I noticed "Lutris" may be a thing to use next, I will certainly be having a go with it. One game I have missed playing was Diablo 3 and looking online it MAY work fine.

Cheers folks

Defaults will be fine. You dont' have to do a thing, just install and game away
I have done some testing against W10, mainly Doom 2016, and it runs equally well
on current, both on vega64 and r9 Fury X, using the Vulkan API.

There might be a very slight advantage using the latest 5.4.0-rc6 kernel and the
latest kernel-firmware, at least on my setup.

Should you run into trouble (black screen at boot) using the standard 4.19.x kernel
series after a firmware uppgrade (I do with vega64) just boot nomodeset and downgrade
kernel-firmware to version 20190923. Available at:
http://slackware.uk/cumulative/slack...6-noarch-1.txz

They changed something in the next version and it only works with 5.x kernels on the vega64.
I have had 0 problems in that regard with polaris, fiji or hawaii cards though, but you never know...

Are you saying that the open AMD drivers are at least as good as the AMD proprietary regarding direct rendering, graphics e.t.c in gaming? How about Vulkan?

If so... I am definitely gonna buy an AMD GPU next time...

Use Vulkan if you can. Opengl works also but the performance difference is huge.
I have also done some very limited testing with the proprietary drivers for linux (using U****u).
Not a very stable experience, don't use them unless you have to IMHO.
I use AMD because they are fast enough for me (4k gaming Doom 2016 with ~70fps) and allows
hassle-free kernel testing.

I shold say that the performance difference using OpenGL is huge also on W10
It does not seem to play nice with AMD at all.

Cheers for the reply rogan.


I have never heard of vulkan, but a quick read that this is the successor to mantle? I remember using this on Battlefield 4 on a low end AMD card and it felt like it ran alot better. Is vulkan installed/enabled by default on 64current? If so do the Games, find enable by default? I noticed on Proton we can send commands to run games as PROTON_USE_D9VK etc I'd be curious to see performance difference

It's there on a default install. Just enable it in the game if it has support for it.

Steam's support for Linux is great. If a native port doesn't work you can make it install and run with Wine. I don't own AMD so I don't know the answer to your question.

This website tells you what runs on Steam Play and what configurations if any you need to do to get something running on Steam: https://www.protondb.com/

I have heard arguments like this before where people will swear on AMDGPU-Pro for some professional use cases, but really its poorly supported upstream compared to the free drivers, especially on Slackware where its repackaged from Ubuntu.

For gaming the free drivers are clearly better, vulkan works fine too with supported cards. There is also a lot of work upstream concerning vulkan now which will make it better in the future.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-aco-okt&num=1

I am not a gamer, but my experience has been that AMD graphics cards work well with the open-source driver, at least for 2D acceleration and OpenGL xscreeensavers. Those have up to tens of thousands of polygons and run smoothly at 4K.

I tried the proprietary driver a decade ago because the open-source driver hadn't caught up to the hardware. The downside of the proprietary driver is that it may preclude upgrading the kernel. That is a serious problem. I was happy when the open-source driver supported the hardware and amazed when it could run 3D.
Ed