# How are the AMD drivers?

## RayDude

If I bought a Radeon RX560 and stuck it in my multimedia PC would my experience be the same as the motherboard intel hardware I've been using up until now?

The last time I tried ATI (a looong time ago), the drivers were a disaster.

Is AMD as stable as intel / NVidia?

Thanks.

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## NeddySeagoon

RayDude,

I'm using a 

```
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Baffin [Radeon RX 460/560D / Pro 450/455/460/560] (rev cf)
```

With the amdgpu driver its been fine since kernel 4.17.0

With older kernels it would lock up once or twice a day and particularly seemed to be sensitive to screen savers.

Performance wise, it doesn't get much of a challenge as I don't game nor do 3D work. 

For me, it big selling point was being silent ... no fans, just a slot full of fins and heat pipes.

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## asturm

All my AMD GPUs work perfectly fine and most importantly kernel/mesa updates have been stable for ages. This is with the opensource radeon(si) drivers. The same can not be said about my Intel chips... All of those are several years old though.

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## Jaglover

```
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] BeaverCreek [Radeon HD 6530D] [1002:964a]

        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company BeaverCreek [Radeon HD 6530D] [103c:2acd]

        Kernel driver in use: radeon

        Kernel modules: radeon

```

This is in my wife's desktop, no complaints, no crashes, she does not do any gaming - so can't comment on gaming.

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## Ant P.

I've been using a RX550 for a few months now. It doesn't feel as solid as the old radeon I had before, but it's more stable than every intel I've ever used.

+

OpenGL is almost 100% complete, and power management works too - you get a nice gauge in lm_sensors for free:

```
$ sensors

amdgpu-pci-0100

Adapter: PCI adapter

vddgfx:       +0.76 V

fan1:         950 RPM

temp1:        +44.0°C  (crit = +97.0°C, hyst = -273.1°C)

power1:        5.24 W  (cap =  36.00 W)
```

That's 4-6 watts idle with one screen. It actually jumps to 10 on this page (probably because of all the emoticon gifs...), with a second screen active it idles around 8-9. I haven't seen it reach 20 yet, even with games and videos running.

~

Vulkan works for the most part (except for one out-of-tree thing I tried that softlocks the driver...)

GPU video decoding sort of works, but there's some awful tearing/pageflipping visual glitches with it; using MPV with it is miserable.

Getting sound working is a pain, and it doesn't play nice with multihead/HDMI.

−

OpenCL support is still useless out of the box, and will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future. There are proprietary hacks you can apply but the ones I tried didn't work.

Haven't successfully used the VAAPI encoding support yet. It doesn't do VP8/9 at all, which might annoy you coming from intel.

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## RayDude

Thanks everyone!

I play minecraft on this PC. Can I do minecraft with a 560ish card at 4K? (or 2K for that matter, that's what I'm doing now with the intel chipset).

By the way, intel has been pretty stable for me. I had some issues with my core-i5-47XX when I first got it, but they fixed those drivers and the opengl performance got high enough that when my GTX750 died, I just left it out and used the MOBO graphics.

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## Marlo

And there is a nice GUI for amdgpu graphics cards.

```
 eix -R radeon-profile
```

To compare with GTX you could start here.

Ma

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## RayDude

Thanks Marlo.

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## Ant P.

 *RayDude wrote:*   

> I play minecraft on this PC. Can I do minecraft with a 560ish card at 4K? (or 2K for that matter, that's what I'm doing now with the intel chipset).

 

With these cards, the CPU is the bottleneck by far. I've gone on servers with the draw distance cranked up to 1km and everything visible maintaining a decent framerate; with more reasonable settings it rarely ever drops below 60fps. The high resolution doesn't put a dent in it.

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## Juippisi

```

VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Baffin [Radeon RX 460/560D / Pro 450/455/460/560] (rev cf)

```

Works nice and updating is painless, but when it comes to performance my much older nvidia card with proprietary drivers performed better (games, desktop compositing).

EDIT: Oh and I cant get to 144 Hz with amdgpu, 120 Hz seems to be the limit.

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## Goverp

One drawback for me: AMDGPU won't hibernate on my laptop.  No other problems.  I'm using the AMDGPU driver on Stoney chips (probably embedded in the motherboard).

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## RayDude

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to post replies.

Based on your replies I still feel the nvidia stuff is more stable. I'll stick with a GTX at this point.

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