Hi all,
I’ve been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It’s been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600XT used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I’ll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you
As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros so I still think its a bit confusing to decide which to use for your needs at first unless you check the video I linked. I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.
Sidenote why cant AMDGPU and RADV combine their efforts to simplify and rename AMDGPU-PRO to AMDGPU-unfree because that itself is confusing since most people will be drawn to use the PRO version without realising the worse performance.
I really don’t think that’s the case, assuming you’re talking about AMDVLK (amdgpu is the kernel module used by all three Vulkan drivers - RADV, AMDVLK and the Vulkan driver from AMDGPU-PRO). Ubuntu and Fedora definitely default to RADV, and Arch Wiki recommends RADV unless you need something from the other drivers.
NixOS seems to default to RADV according to their Wiki. If this was a few years ago then maybe you might be confusing it with the ACO shader compiler for RADV? That brought a significant performance increase and eventually became the default in RADV. I remember using custom Mesa (the project that develops open source graphics drivers, like RADV and radeonsi) builds to massively reduce stuttering in DirectX games.