I just recently installed Ubuntu and I just bought an RX 480, so its my first time installing a card with Linux. I noticed that everyone is switching over to the AMDGPU and I presume this is the driver I should go for.
I came across this link which involved configuring the kernel which seems pretty daunting:
Finally should I setup the card using the on board graphics or does Linux detect the video card enough to provide a display on my monitor like it does on windows, apologies if this a noob question I am still transitioning over to linux. Thanks in advance for any replies.
Ubuntu is one of the few distro's that supports the AMDGPU-PRO driver. The AMDGPU driver is the open source one. I am still wrapping my head around it. But, things like sound over HDMI are not supported in the AMDGPU but are in AMDGPU-PRO. If you are just planning on using the open source drivers it is plug and play. Installing pro drivers is made easy by AMD's installer.
I'm probably not going to be using HDMI so I wonder which one I should use, I did a quick search and the pro version provides some api support particularly vulkan. Apparently the pro version is a layer on top of the amdgpu driver, I'm just wondering if I follow the second link from the amd website which is how to install the pro version, will it include the amdgpu as well during installation?
I installed my Rx 480 today and wanted to install the AMDGPU-PRO drivers but get the folowing error:
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/amdgpu-pro-uninstall': File exists
I also ran a command to see what driver was actually in use and it says 'amdgpu' which I believe to be kernal side.
Dota 2 runs fine but I do not have the pro version of the driver installed. Apparently it is not supported by ubuntu 16.10, I guess I will stick with this until they roll it out for 16.10.
As far as I know, there might be some ways to get the driver working on 16.10 (its mostly about the pro drivers dkms incompatibility with kernel 4.8 i think) but I dont think its worth the hassle, as the fully open source driver is quite good will gain most of the pro driver's features once DC is ready. Also when it comes to the kernel incompatibility, that shouldnt be an issue anymore, as AMD's driver structure was supposed to prevent that. I dont know why this is still an issue and why AMD hasn't fixed that in the last two updates
Yeah I saw a blog on how to get it going on 16.10 but as you say it is not worth the hassle. What is the open source driver, 'amdgpu'? Also what is DC? Apologies for the questions just want to have a fair idea of whats going on driver wise for ubuntu as I just switched from windows,
Give the above link a read. I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on one of my ssd's to try and get the AMDGPU-PRO drive running. A day later I was back on Antergos using the AMDGPU driver. Ubuntu is so terrible these days I think it is fastly becoming the Windows of the Linux world. I am suitably pleased with the open source driver AMDGPU performance that I don't care about the "PRO" driver anymore. I mostly use it to play 7 Days to Die and I am getting about 60 fps on medium-high graphics. My 780 would get better FPS but I am pretty sure it was running out of texture memory seeing as the game crashed ALL THE TIME when it was installed. So, 60 FPS with this horribly unoptimized Unity based game is pretty good. And someone else, I believe on this forum, made the point that AMD has a good reputation on improving their drivers over time. So long as they don't muck something up terribly I am strongly considering getting a second 480 and running a crossfire setup. Or getting a Vega card. I am just out of patience waiting for new AMD stuff to come out.
the opensource driver will work out of the box, and the amdgpupro is the fancy smancy driver by amd.
The open source driver should be getting all the amdgpupro features in the future. AMD is removing their BLOB from the kernel stack pull request. i would avoid adjusting kernel because next release of kernel should include their needed adjustments.
I'm thinking about grabbing one myself, but my r9 280x is working fine on all games using open source driver on ubuntu 16.06
Ya, I can't say for sure but it would seem the open source drivers have already improved. I am getting 60 fps in 7d versus 23 last week. Not sure what changed. If anyone does end up getting a 480 I can't praise Sapphire enough. The Sapphire 480 cooler barely tries ever .. which is a good thing. I guess this means I can wipe my Ubuntu install and stop trying to get the AMDGPU-PRO driver working.