Recent AMDGPU-PRO driver makes a BIG difference for AMD users

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Just thought I mention the recent AMDGPU-PRO BETA driver that has a DKMS module that works with 16.04 Ubuntu releases (sorry no source for ARCH or any other atm due to BETA) makes a great difference, even out does fglrx.

Games I have tested so far that really put AMD cards to the test are: Warthunder and Dying Light, the first game is notorious for being extremely pro NVIDIA when it comes to performance tweaks (Gaijin really don't like AMD).

Now there are some things to consider, I'm using a R9 390X. The drivers appear to work on 7700 series and up cards, ignore the list AMD gives on site, that is 'what we have bothered testing so far' list and isn't representative of what cards may actually work fine with driver.

Essentially all GCN 1.1/1.2 cards SHOULD work with it.

Very IMPORTANT, you will need AMDGPU and CIK enabled in the kernel, my Ubuntu 16 MATE had CIK support disabled for some reason, so I had to recompile my kernel from stretch, as such I decided to compile Kernel 4.6 and I suggest everyone else to do the same to ensure they get recent patches (haven't tested 4.7rc's atm).

Here is a kernel building guide I used (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild) just grab the source tarballs from official sites.

Anyway with radeon/amdgpu open driver I was getting 10-28fps in Warthunder with LOW as can be settings, while with AMDGPU-PRO I was able to achieve 50-70fps with medium-high settings at 4k!, thats with grass slide halfway too! I did notice that ground forces was more smoother then flying, but perhaps thats because flying on ground force maps stresses the GPU more vs just Air maps.

Dying Light at 4k appeared playable but will likely need some settings adjusted to get the best out of it, I also only had the demo so no idea if full version works better. Next on my test list will likely be Mordor or something.

Note about Vulkan, this component must be installed separately and fetched from the LunarG website. Its mostly pain free process and AMD provides instructions (you will need an account to login and download it I believe). Be sure to build and run the provided cube/trig tests to ensure you have Vulkan installed correctly.

I hope all this can be made a little easier to do in the future, having CIK disabled in my kernel config really messed me up for a good few hours as it forced my monitor into 1024x768 mode and caused crashing.

2 Likes
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Awesome! Do you have any idea how AMDGPU-PRO compares to the Windows driver?

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I would say its somewhere within 70% of the windows driver performance. Of cause it will vary depending on game and settings.

I was just flying a air mission before and got between 60-85fps (4k) so thats nice, the open driver was no where near that in warthunder air missions. I will haft to fix the vsync/tearing at some point, AMD claims freesync is coming to their drivers at some point so fingers crossed on that one.

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Huh, neat. I'll have to wait for stability though. Can't have my rig go out on me ^-^ I'm only playing source games atm though. when these drivers get finished do you think that wine will perform better? I would hope so.

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I never really got into Wine, but I would assume it perform better yes. To be honest I'm waiting for DX11 support to hit wine, I want to test Fallout4 under Wine, its going to be hilariously bad no doubt...

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Damn impressive: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-probeta2-mesa113&num=2

2 Likes
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dam this is making linux actually look viable for my desktop apart from the fact most games i play are DX11 which wine doesn't support fully yet

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has anybody had the chance to test Dota 2 with the Vulkan API with these drivers?
I'm curious how they perform against the windows Vulkan drivers.

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https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1605248-GA-1605243HA07

Other reports can be found on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/4kqwj1/dota_2_vulkan_support_released/
or on phoronix.

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Just keep in mind Phoronix does allot of synthetic benchmarks and runs the same few games over and over, you will never see them test stuff like Warthunder/ARMA3/SOMA etc... (All those Phoronix tests~ are running OGL4.1 I believe!)

I hope the Open driver gets OGL4.5/Vulkan someday soon but until then I can't use it because of that as quite a few games I have tried with it had HUGE performance problems along with crashtodesktop issues on launching game or gameplay.

There are allot of people who are very hostile towards closed or semi-closed source drivers, I really don't get it, must be some religious thing....

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Would like to mention, amdgpu-pro produces a WHITE screen with Mutter WM so don't use that, use compton or something.

Also Feral games require a GL String patch, you can do this by saying 'patch myfile < somepatch.patch'
There are 32bit and 64bit files that need these patches, again this is just for Feral games.

I only have Company of Heroes 2 and Shadow of Mordor, without these patch they wouldn't load.

PATCH FILE LINKS
http://atom-symbol.net/f/2016-05-25/

COH2 doesn't produce great performance, best play that at 1080p, while SOM actually performs quite well even at 4k for my 390x, however I play it at 1440p for more consistent fps. Haven't tested XCOM2 yet.

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could you further explain this patch? not sure what you mean

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It allows Feral games to work, with the beta drivers. Because AMD did a booboo (I guess its AMD's fault?) and have their OpenGL version string: 4.5.13439 ... Feral games don't like that. Simply changing that (what the patch's do) fixes it. However I dunno howto modify SO files myself, so someone made these handy patches.

This was the case for my 390x which would not launch Feral games at all, if you don't have any issues then don't worry about it. In fact Feral knows about the problem so they may have fixed up a few games by now.

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where do i install the patches?

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locate your amdgpu_dri.so files first, you will have two, one for 32bit another for 64bit. Copy them out of folder to public safe spot to apply patch on them

uses the patch command

I think its patch yourso.so < thispatchfile.patch... just check on that beforehand. Once files patched you SUDO copy them over original. Pay careful attention to the 32/64 bit thing.

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I've tried that driver on ubuntu and its great but sadly it doesnt work on arch yet (though there is an aur package availabe but like I said it doesnt work yet)

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i get all that lol i just have no clue where the files are that i need to patch

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the locate command is your friend...

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Got Skyrim with ENB/Mods running at 4k@60fps under Wine POL. Took ALLOT of work, even have Ultra settings. Its quite a miracle to play it, I actually had it working for a while but lots of freezing and crashing, then I fixed that but had Stuttering like mad.... It was a journey to resolve all these issues!

Honestly I love how in Linux you just need a bit of time and patience (and know howto use google well). I even fixed that STUPID Steam system out of date CLI message that popped up.