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

  • @Markaos
    3•3 hours ago

    I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers.

    RADV is the open-source community developed Vulkan driver. It has the widest hardware support of the three Vulkan drivers and is generally the best for gaming.

    AMD provides two more Vulkan drivers - AMDVLK is the open-source one available in AMDGPU, then there’s the unnamed proprietary Vulkan driver in AMDGPU-PRO. The biggest advantage of the proprietary one is that it is certified - doesn’t matter most of the time, but when it does, a missing certification is a deal breaker.

    • jaxiiruff
      2•2 hours ago

      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.

      • @Markaos
        1•1 hour ago

        As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros

        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.

        I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.

        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.