I think it still technically exists but its not worth. most games dont scale very well with it. Better off just buying the bigger beefier card.
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I dont think crossfire ever worked well for Linux. I wouldn’t trust it.
Theoretically it worked, but the AMD opensource devs did not see a big enough market to finish it. The plumbing is there though.
With VULKAN multi GPU support being superior in every way according to driver devs and developers, that may be a path forward.
Honestly, you are still better with one single GPU to rule them all. Newest card that you can get with grade A open source support is Vega 64 and RX 580. The 590 needs kernel 5.0. I believe VII also needs that kernel but graphics wise, it is under performing. Radeon 5700 is still baking in 5.2 i believe so you do not want to go with that card yet.
I have a 1070 (for a long time now). Never had to jump threw a hoop and kernels are CONSTANTLY updating on Fedora!
But NVIDIA has no support for wayland and AMD has open source drivers that are built into the kernel. So, really I’d probably pick NAVI over Nvidia for those reasons. Also, especially because I’m perfectly happy with 1070 performance still, Navi is gonna deliver that just fine.
So you really only have two hoops. That’s number 1 installing it (but most popupar distros give you easy to setup and maintain repos for that). And then number 2 is dealing with Nvidia X Settings, witch is i don’t know. Just not fun to deal with and it took me forever to figure out at the start how to make it persist it’s settings. Eventually, after a billion trial and error reboots I managed.
I was thinking about waiting for the RX 5700 XT
Sounds like a good decision, considering it’s like 2 weeks away.
Your going to need to run Kernel 5.2 and latest mesa if you want to play games with the 5700. Just a heads up.
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I wonder does installing amd gpu pro dodge this requirement? For people whos distro isnt updating kernels all the time.
That will take care of it as long as you are using the pro version that supports the card. Sometimes you have to get it directly from AMD as some distros do not provide the most upto date Pro driver in time for new card releases.
Ok good!
I dont need that to work, just mostly was curious if it would. 
Thanks for this tip, probably saved me a lot of headache.
Running AMD GPU’s will be a lot less hassle (& the open source drivers are quite good) - nvidia drivers require a bit more maintenance & the nouveau open source drivers do not work with hardened kernels.
If you spend some time making KVM GPU Passthrough work the performance will be good enough. I’m still running an FX 8370 with an RX 570 8gb passed through to the Windows VM & play everything on high / ultra @ 1080p. Using real-time fifoschedulers in libvirt for the pinned cores & iothreads is the secret sauce see my previous posts for details.
I have Steam working in Linux & proton installed but it is overall less hassle to just game with the Windows VM (I think Wendell came to the same conclusion). My system is also dual boot but I stopped booting into Windows around 10 months ago. With 2 screens I can game on the Windows VM on one & monitor Linux stuff on the other.
Another thing to consider is AMD driver support lasts a lot longer than Nvidia.
If you start with 2 GPU’s & a dual boot system you can experiment with everything. Rx 560 4GB works well as a host card for Linux.
Bought a second hand Vega 56 about a year ago, and I have no regrets. It’s more than fast enough for the games I play, and has been pretty seamless with Fedora 29. I even use a bleeding edge repo for amdgpu, Mesa and DXVK, and haven’t had any trouble at all as a result. The bleeding edge bit probably isn’t necessary any more, but rooting out all the packages and repos at this point seems like too much of a hassle.
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Personally, i’ll take out of the box drivers that just work over the performance gain at the extreme high end every day of the week thanks.
I did the nvidia proprietary driver dance with previous machines, not having to worry about kernel upgrades breaking my display driver any more is a breath of fresh air.
I am not interested in the whole KVM passthrough technology. I deeply dislike Microsoft technology and try to stay away from it as far away as possible and not support it in any way. Now of course this is just my personal opinion but for me KVM is still supporting Windows. Back in the days I didn’t pick Linux because it’s more convenient to use or install, I picked it because it is a way cooler technology. I am sticking with it. To be honest I am pretty happy with Lutris and Wine so far, I am excited to check out proton as well. I am getting the Radeon 5700 XT when they release better coolers and drivers.
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I 100% agree with you. Also, people who justify their piracy by “I hate Microsoft and want them to suffer”. By using the product, regardless if you pay for it, you support it. For me, I have two reasons to want it, Windows only games and Solidworks. The former is starting to evaporate, and the latter can be replaced by FreeCAD nowadays. Not all features mind you, and SolidWorks still has a lot of polish that I miss in FreeCAD so I can probably get 25% faster performance in SolidWorks, but much is already in place.
I do think Passthrough will have another good reason to exist soon however; as a 32-bit system on a full 64-bit host. With 16 core chips on the horizon and 64 GB of RAM becoming commonplace, it wouldn’t surprise me if many Windows-only games go one step further and run in a dedicated VM for the compatibility.
^this
Will be interesting if such idea comes to life.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-5700-linuxgl&num=3
Instead of giving opinions I am going to give real and synthetic benchmarks.
Mind you, AMD needs bleeding edge kernels. If rolling release isn’t your cup of tea I would use NVIDIA.
I really think that is an interesting conception with regards to 32 bit support, but officially no other distro other than Ubuntu plans to remove these libraries.
Debian has arguably had pretty bad multiarch support from the start in its own right compared to distros like SUSE and Arch. Even so, it’s still maintained properly.
Ubuntu has created a false sense of worry as of late, and that isn’t a good thing.
I will say that after 2038, 32 bit support will be long gone, but I don’t see it getting phased out until later in the upcoming decade. We’re talking post-2025 here, and I’m sure there will be a plausible solution to the 32 bit problem once that time comes.
Lots of people aren’t going to agree with me but I find Ubuntus initial plan to drop 32 bit sooner rather than later admirable.
The disposal of 32 bit software in multiarch will have to happen eventually, so Steam will need to find their own way of supporting it.
One thing someone suggested was flatpak but Valve never got back to them. Not only would that provide an isolated environment for Steam and it’s games, but it would increase security as it runs similar to how jails work on FreeBSD.
Those are just my thoughts with regards to everything going onm we can’t keep nudging 32 bit software with a stick
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That was true in 2014 when the nvidia driver would crash ewerything and catalyst wasn’t getting dev’d anymore. However my laptop has a gtx 1060 and a 120hz panel, and when it isn’t fighting with me I get about 150 fps in rust, csgo, tf2. I mean I stream from linux.
Yeah thats not really a thing anymore. Now you’re mostly worried about the nvidia driver using primus correctly. But its nvidia, so its a flip of a weighted coin sometimes.