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·
    2 months 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.