Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I’ve not used Linux as my mainly driver for years. I miss it and I want to come back but I basically don’t have any decent PC anymore so I have the freedom to get/build one. When I used it, ironically, NVidia was the way to go on Linux and ATI/AMD was a shit show. Is AMD ok nowadays ? My needs are mostly confortable casual gaming where I don’t care having more than 60fps and I don’t play online (so this…
Despite my complaints, for casual gaming on a desktop you shouldn't have too many issues with Nvidia's drivers these days as long as you can use the ones packaged by your distro instead of Nvidia's installer. My troubles have mostly been associated with laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics, or desktops used for ML training where the distro-packaged drivers wouldn't work for one reason or another. I've hea…
They are OK but with some caveats like VP9 HW decode not being available in Linux AMD iGPU drivers for reasons, which won't be a problem if you're running an AMD desktop tower PC, but if you're gonna watch Youtube on your AMD laptop, your battery will take a hit along with possible extra fan noise, which is unacceptable for a great media content consumption experience in Linux when even no-name Android phones and tablets have VP9 HW decode in Youtube out of the box. No bueno.
This is such a mess, as VP9 & AV1 HW video decode is not an issue under linux for Intel iGPUs, but AMD seems to not give a shit to expose VP9 decode on linux for their iGPUs. Also, unlike with Intel iGPUs, under linux, radeon-top does not show GPU decode usage for easy diagnostic purposes. I assume it's because AMD bought the video codec engine IP from some third party fabless IP vendor and they don't have the permission to open source the drivers for the video engine block as part of the licensing agreement, like they do for their in house developed GPU block. But still, regardless of the reason, it sucks for the linux end-users.
And another important issue nobody seems to talk about but one should be aware of, AMD APUs (at least to 5000 series) don't have unified memory between CPU and iGPU like Intel and Apple do, so you have to configure in your laptop BIOS how much of your system RAM you want allocated to your iGPU (512MB/1GB/2GB/4GB), with the rest remaining for the CPU. This sucks big time if you're switching between productivity where you need more memory for applications, and playing video games where you need as much memory as possible for the GPU, so you need to keep rebooting and changing in the BIOS the amount of memory you allocate to your iGPU, vs on Intel chips where the whole system memory is unified and shared dynamically between the CPU and iGPU, and it boils my blood as the whole marketing gimmick of AMD's APUs was the seamless merger between CPU and GPU resources together, while in practice their (5000 series) APUs are just a Ryzen CPU with a Vega GPU glued on the same die without them actually sharing any of the resources properly. Maybe the new 6000 series with RDNA2 changed that but I couldn't find any detailed info.
Honestly, as a laptop owner with AMD APU, if you're planning to go Linux, just get one with an Intel chip instead. Much less head aches as Intel Linux drivers and apps are second to none and have a unified memory model.
The performance and efficiency of AMD APUs is still great though, especially under Windows, but the overall implementation as a whole package seems poorly thought out and rushed out the door, especially under Linux compared to Intel.