Switching from nvidia to AMD
 

So I'm getting a new video card (yay) Real Soon Now, barring any emergencies for which I'll have to toss money at. I'm looking at the RX 7600 XT. (I'm not gaming at 1440 or anything crazy, but I do game.)

Anything I'll need to do to make the switch from nvidia to AMD? I'm told uninstall nvidia's drivers, and reboot?

I know there are different AMD drivers. I'm told amdgpu and radv have the best performance currently for gaming? These are installed by default? Will I need to specify anything while booting?

Anything else I should know? (I'm pretty stock slackware-current at the moment.)

Are you booting to run level 3, or 4?

My guess is that the change would be easier if you do things from run level 3.

Runlevel 3. It's just force of habit.

Amdgpu is part of Slackware, but I don't know what radv is... the only part that isn't installed (not needed for games) is OpenCL (like from KingBeowulf's amdgpu-opencl though may be outdated, at least on Slackware-current).

radv is the opensource vulkan driver for amd in mesa. If you use current, the RX7600XT will probably just work for gaming. 15.0 might be using too old a version of mesa. Upgrading the kernel by compiling the latest stable source is usually pretty simple. Upgrading mesa can sometimes be much less so.

Yeah, when I built this computer, I needed the hardware support for current, and I just never left. Aside from a couple glitches and some 3rd party things that need rebuilding, it's remarkably stable.

And I'm expecting some troubles and growing pains switching, because nothing ever goes right the first time with a computer. :)

I did not recommend you to getting AMD video card.

Here is a few things that you need to know before did this:

1. If you will use your new card to start Wayland and Firefox, watching Youtube or some MKV ignore next things.

2. Most of the applications, encoders, decoders and so on have support for CUDA which is registered to NVIDIA ONLY, the alternative for AMD is a big ... read below.

3. AMDGPU PRO driver and installation which should be "all in one" work on Ubuntu, RedHat and Fedora if I remember correct. It's require a lot's of time if you will try to build it on Slackware and finally you may not succeed.

4. The AMD alternative for CUDA is called ROCm which contain around 251 packages and also no support for Slackware. For my surprise Arch linux was able to build ROCm 6.0.2 and they support the packages. I was able to compile most of required ROCm 6.0.2 packages on Slackware, but this take me a two weeks and I finally give up. I was stuck on some compilation issues and ROCm community it's not much helpful if you are not using one of official distros above.

5. Most AI developments require CUDA, they don't have support for AMD.

Nice to know.

Helpfully for me, I am looking too.

What about intel graphics and Intel’s OneAPI ? complicated as AMD?

Edited:
As always I ask before search and need edit the post. XD

Seems there is a tarball in slackbuilds

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...opment/oneDPL/

Is this like Cuda?

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...t/cudatoolkit/

Have common IA supoport for Intel?

Thanks in advance.

I'm not using it and can't tell you, but a quick check on their git tell me the last release is from 2022.05.

Intel CPU - yes, Intel GPU - no.

For example: TensorFlow home page and check requirements:

as I write above it's depend for what you will use this card.

Not what I'm asking here, and I use neither cuda nor AI in what I do that isn't gaming.

Switch off power of your pc, remove NVIDIA card and insert AMD. Power it on.

Wholaa, that it's.

LOL. Good to know.

Kidding aside, I do stream occasionally, and I know nvidia is better for that. If my twitch career takes off, I can revisit the issue then. ;)

i am using a laptop with a rx 7600s for 3 month now and i am very happy.

so far i had one crash and one program (factorio) did not play well with the 6.6. driver. i am using kernel 6.9. now, which comes with a lot of improvements, and no problems so far.

i know the shortcomings of amd graphic cards, but i just do the occasional gaming.

what is important to me is that the driver is fully integrated into the kernel, including /sys/ support for tweaking the card. there are several tools out there to do that (e.g. radeon-profile).

things i miss i just write myself, which is as easy as reading/writing files in /sys/.

overall i love the ryzen/radeon combination.

I upgraded to an AMD system at the end of last year.

CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D
GPU Radeon 7900XT
Mobo: ASUS Prime X670E-PRO


I was having stability issues on this and a previous Ryzen system, but as of February this year I've not seen any major crashes. As long as you are up-to-date with -current you should be fine, but I would keep an eye out for regressions with mesa and the kernel. For the past month the only reason I have had to reboot my computer is for updates.

For games nothing is needed, AMDGPU is loaded and power management works out of the box. I spent a few hours this past weekend trying out Freesync on my 1440p monitor @144hz. I was able to maintain 144fps in Valheim without too much trouble (with a few exceptions).


For ROCm, it's actually more like 30 packages, less if you only want the opencl runtime. I managed to get ROCm 6.x compiled and running on my system for BOINC and phoronix-test-suite, but I need to go back through and make sure it's reproducible on other systems. Might be more like 10 packages if you just want to run opencl programs.

Thanks, all. I think I've got the information I need. I'm not doing anything too crazy with video, and still game on 1080p. If I need more, I can always revisit it then.