A thread for Slackware users who use AMD graphics hardware

While I knew AMD bought ATi in 2006, I was surprised to find the ATi brand name was completely discontinued in 2010. RIP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies#History

Here is the recent news.

The story is here, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa....Q4.4-Released

ATI seemed to stop doing linux drivers(and research generally) after the ATI R7000(2001?). By 2010, the ATI brand was totally discredited anyhow. I had an AMD/ATI RS690 (Vintage 2007) in a HP laptop, and I never managed lip synch of full screen action. So a speaker standing there and talking - yes, it would lip synch. But a singer singing with a stage act of singers and dancers - no way. Even movies were only there or thereabouts. They dropped my RS690 from the proprietary driver after 2-3 years. I corresponded with the devs after complaining to them rather bitterly and eloquently. They more or less admitted that it was a POS, but it's where they were, hardware & software wise.The result was that I went to the trouble of installing LLVM to build their Open Source driver, because, I was told, my card didn't have a vertex shader (whatever that is). The resulting driver after all that pain was still no use.

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That's just AMD's standalone Vulkan implementation, you install that alongside Mesa/RADV. It won't be appropriate for all applications/games, so you'd use the vulkan-icd-loader (part of vulkan-sdk package in Slackware) to switch between them with an environment variable.

I find (and haven't figured out a way to change the default behaviour) if AMDVLK is installed the icd loader defaults to that and I have to use an environment variable to use Mesa RADV Vulkan:

If you have multilib and run 32 bit applications/games, use amd_icd32.json or radeon_icd.i686.json

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Related to Mesa/RADV Vulkan (not for AMDVLK) with amdgpu, more good news is that Valve's ACO Vulkan shader compiler has been merged into Mesa 19.3.0 and it's a much better compiler than either RADV's or AMDVLK's (which I find to be slower... really hitchy until shaders are compiled and cached if they have to be compiled on the pipeline, which is par for the course with Wine/DXVK directx to vulkan API translation)

ACO is not enabled by default at this time, it has to be enabled with an environment variable:

Almost good on-the-fly shader compiling, depending on the shaders. For example, Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (ported to Vulkan) is hitchy until shaders are compiled and cached, with either RADV or AMDVLK. Not so with RADV using ACO. I used the Cairo Museum level to test because that's pretty hitchy and it was bloody perfect. Also, Witcher 3 running through Proton saw huge initial improvements while compiling/caching shaders. Still a bit hitchy while panning around for the first time, but that's unavoidable in that circumstance. The key point is only for about 10 or 15 seconds. Other games I've tested without problem are native Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Feral, and Mass Effect Andromeda through Wine/DXVK (using Lutris for EA Origin client)

I'm sold on that.

The ACO compiler supports GFX8 (Tonga) and upwards.

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How do you install AMD drivers? There is a slackbuild script but its two years old now. I'm using an R7 260x card.

Compared with the NVidia blob and their arrogance toward Nouveau, the best AMD drivers comes with the Linux kernel, Xorg and Mesa.

And I read that this open-source implementation is the one recommended for home users and gamers, while the closed source one is recommended only for businesses and the professional video-cards.

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You probably already have the best driver for that card in use (Xorg radeon). The old AMD fglrx driver won't work anymore, both kernel and xorg-server will be incompatible. Your card also would not be supported by "amdgpu-pro", the current proprietary driver.

It's possible to also use the amdgpu driver with that card I think if "Enable amdgpu support for CIK parts" is enabled for the driver in kernel (it is in slackware-current distro kernel config, I just checked) but I don't know what benefit you would perceive over radeon for that card.

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From what I read, the Vulkan and OpenCL support are available only on "andgpu" driver, but not also on "radeon" .

However, the "radeon" driver is more consolidated for those particular SI and CIK video-cards, that's why it's also the default kernel driver for them.

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/Dismayed

A lot of those posts went over my head. It seems like I'll have to do some study if I ever install an AMD Graphics card again. I'm wondering what do business users get in the proprietary drivers that home users & gamers don't need? I thought gamers demanded the most from cards, not business.

I have a Radeon HD 5870 and in Slackware I've never had to install special drivers to play games. In Debian it was another matter, but I'm able to play quite graphically-demanding games out of the box in Slackware.

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I thought that the gamers demands certainly different features from cards, compared with the businesses.

And by business I understand the people who do graphics art and so on, but probably AMD themselves would explain better:

https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/workstations

For everyone else, including the gamers, AMD do its best on open-source stacks, at least on Linux.

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I've been building my desktops and servers since the mid-90's. Being somewhat of a minimalist I gravitated to quieter, lower power PC builds. I'm currently very happy with my aging AMD APUs with the Radeon built into the processor. The desktop has 10 compute cores, 4 CPU cores plus 6 graphic cores, never let me down yet. I'm not a gamer but do use a 32" 2K monitor (2560x1440) as my daily driver with lots of video demands. Haven't needed proprietary drivers with both the amdgpu & radeon modules loaded automagically with the generic kernel.

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The article can be found here, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...GPUPerfAPI-3.5

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With that many cores lying about, I'm sure you are happy. Some of us have laptops, where the number of cores is a heat & battery consumption vs. power tradeoff. Mine has a 35W limit; If I go above 35W, I'll have to source the appropriate heatsink. That will get me to 55W which is all they allow. So I can't stick in a 105W (or higher) cpu.

But your point is valid. My next box will be a real pc, with a real cpu & graphics card, and I don't expect ever to have to update it. As wafer fab approaches the limit,speed increases no longer make boxes obsolete. Back in the day, If you had a '286, things would fly, Then came the '386, '486, etc to where we are today. All those early cpus with their tiny memory allocations would be seriously challenged by today's expectations. I don't think that will ever happen to today's cpus/memory.

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More bugs.

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