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I running Windows 10 on my box, I never had AMD Card with Linux all I have used is Nvidia cards. Any advice to use AMD R7 260x on Linux?

Any popular, current and stable distro will be plug and play.

If you want freesync you must use amdgpu-pro driver on Ubuntu.

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The drivers for AMD on linux have greatly improved in the past few years. Some argue at times they’re superior to Nvidia’s even.

The 260x should be plug and play on the more common distros.

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@SudoSaibot and @ThatBootsGuy are correct, if you’re going to use AMD on Linux you should definitely try and use AMDGPU-PRO drivers, I don’t know how much they’ve improved the driver since I used it 2 years ago but it’s a HUGE improvement over AMD’s older driver.

AMD suggests their PRO driver be used with their nongaming high end cards. The open source components in both drivers are essentially the same. But, I have had the PRO driver fail after a kernel upgrade.

AMD’s driver page lists the Linux games that can use Freesync. It’s a short list. I’ve no idea about Freesync with Windows games on Wine, etc.

In any case, when you install a distribution, you will be using the current AMDGPU driver that distro supports. I wouldn’t bother experimenting with the PRO driver unless you’re unhappy with that one.

So I have an rx480 that I bought the day after launch. I have had it on linux since I purchased it. I have been using the drivers in the kernel since they started putting drivers in the kernel for it, and I have never really had any problems.

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Yes, the kernel drivers are awesome. I have an rx470, I have been using the kernel drivers for a while now. It’s quite a bit easier when your driver is in the kernel. I have done the whole thing with AMDGPU-PRO. It was too difficult, and getting screen tearing to stop was a pain. Since I started using the kernel driver, no tearing. And with games it seems to be stable as all heck. So, that’s awesome.

AMD has really found and interesting balance of being able to keep their special sauce secret in the AMD-GPU Pro drivers, but still being able to benefit from the open source community with 95% of the driver being open source. I really wonder if more companies will do the same.

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