AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#131

Post by EndShell » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

0x457 wrote: post #118

awill wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows Nvidia has better drivers. On Linux, AMD is far ahead.

> On Linux, AMD is far ahead. Depends on a metric. I found Nvidia drivers to be better on every platform. It's just because it's closed-source it's PITA to install and update, but everything in between is great. I've switched to AMD for religious reasons, tho. Even update story is worse on Windows for AMD, at least it was when I had RX 6900 XT.

When I was using my 1080Ti on Debian with the official driver, I would frequently have problems on screen 2 where there seemed to be no video acceleration. I could fix this temporarily through some setting in the Nvidia drivers but it would stop working after a reboot.

I had several bad updates (this was when using Fedora) and was left with graphics 30 minutes before I had to start work, I ended up plugging in a really old AMD GPU to be able to work for the day and then spent several hours faffing to get graphics back up.

I will only buy AMD/Intel cards now because it is plug and play on Linux. I've had no problems with the AMD card on Debian 12. On Debian 11 I had to enable a non-free repo to install the relevant firmware. The 1080Ti as awesome at the time as it was, only worked properly and reliably under Windows.

The other issue with Nvidia is when they stop supporting your card, their drivers will sooner or later not work with the kernel. I have an older machine that works quite well and I had to buy another GPU as the legacy Nvidia drivers do not work with new kernels. The hardware itself works fine.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#132

Post by mort96 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #7

Is modern Radeon support on Linux still great? I've heard that NV Geforce on Linux was kinda bad since ever, but it has massively improved over the past 3-4 years. Is Radeon still the way to go for Linux? EDIT: My usecase is a Linux gaming PC. I was fortunate enough to score an RX 6800 during the pandemic, but moved from Windows 10 to Linux a month ago. Everything seems solid, but I'm looking to upgrade the whole PC…

Older AMD cards have excellent Linux support across the board.

Brand new AMD cards have great support -- in mainline Linux and MESA. But if you're using a kernel and MESA from a distro, you're gonna have a hard time for the first ~8 months. You'll either have to run a rolling release distro or make your own kernel, linux-firmware and MESA packages. I had to do this when I got a 7900XT card a few months after launch while running Ubuntu.

This is the Linux driver model working as intended, and it sucks.

I suspect you may also encounter issues with Flatpaks, since from my understanding, these use the MESA userspace from a runtime so they wont work until the Flatpak runtime they use updates their MESA. I don't think it helps to have a working MESA on the host system. I'm not 100% certain about this though, would love some feedback from people with a better understanding of these things.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#133

Post by tomnipotent » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #29

Thaxll wrote: post #14

The problem is that AMD is nowhere close to DLSS performance/quality, AMD cards are good for rasterization but it's not enough. The other thing is that most game don't implement FSR because 90%+ cards are nvidia.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/technologies/fideli... Lots of games do and will support FSR because current gen consoles are all AMD (and console gamers outnumber PC gamers).

> and console gamers outnumber PC gamers

It's my understanding that there are 2-3x more PC gamers than console gamers, but the console gaming market generates more revenue when you include hardware. In fact there are probably more PC gamers today than total consoles ever sold.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#134

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #114

The hardware itself seems like it will be welcome in the market. But I find AMD GPU launches so frustrating, the branding is all over the place and it feels like there is never any consistent generational series. Instead you get these seemingly random individual product launches that slot somewhere in the market, but you never know what comes next. In comparison nVidia has had pretty consistent naming since 200 serie…

AMD seriously needs to fire its marketing team. Think how you would do it if you could introduce a naming schema and think of how to name technical features - it would be very easy to improve on what AMD is doing.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#135

Post by TylerE » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #104

awill wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows Nvidia has better drivers. On Linux, AMD is far ahead.

Was never my experience over decades. Nvidia’s proprietary drivers were a pain the ass to install but they were great to use.

Ditto. I was around to remember the fglrx days on the AMD side. Ugggggggly. And that situation persisted for over a decade.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#136

Post by smallmancontrov » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #114

The hardware itself seems like it will be welcome in the market. But I find AMD GPU launches so frustrating, the branding is all over the place and it feels like there is never any consistent generational series. Instead you get these seemingly random individual product launches that slot somewhere in the market, but you never know what comes next. In comparison nVidia has had pretty consistent naming since 200 serie…

0xA070

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#137

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

packetlost wrote: post #85

wronglebowski wrote: post #48

No ROCm at launch? After they delayed it for months? What a joke. That's like not having CUDA available at launch. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ROCm-RX-9070-Launch-Day

This card is marketed to consumers, not AI developers. Most people who will buy these cards don't even know what ROCm is. Edit: it just doesn't matter for launch day. It'll likely be supported eventually.

Developers introduction to a technical ecosystem is more than likely using the card they already own. And "It'll likely be supported eventually" just signals that they're not serious about investing in their software. AMD is selling enough CPUs to finance a few developers.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#138

Post by xyst » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #114

The hardware itself seems like it will be welcome in the market. But I find AMD GPU launches so frustrating, the branding is all over the place and it feels like there is never any consistent generational series. Instead you get these seemingly random individual product launches that slot somewhere in the market, but you never know what comes next. In comparison nVidia has had pretty consistent naming since 200 serie…

Marketing department at AMD missed the targets. But honestly, I don’t care about that.

Price is very competitive, and as long as benchmarks and QC are on point. Then this is a massive win for AMD.

NVDA as a “market leader” dropped the ball with the 50 series. So many issues that have turned me away from their products.

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#139

Post by atemerev » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

PedroBatista wrote: post #55

imtringued wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy used nvidia tesla p40 with 24GB from 2016 and unlike AMD, they still have CUDA support. The only thing they are missing is support for the latest data types like fp8.

I don't know if I'm in a parallel Universe or hallucinating, but these are graphics cards, designed and created for people to install in they deskop PCs and run games. Just like they have been doing it for decades now. What's with the P40, CUDA and fp8? Seriously people, chill. AI has been using graphics cards because that was the best available route at the time, not the other way around. Otherwise I must question,…

Because, unless you are a Big Corp, you can't afford to buy H100s. Being able to run AI on consumer hardware is essential for many AI hackers out there. And no, renting hardware on "AI clouds" is not reliable — still outrageously expensive, and the rug can be pulled out of you at any moment.

My rig is 4x4090, and it did cost a fortune to me already (still less expensive than a single H100). I would have happily used cheaper AMD cards, but they are not available for reasons like this.

Last time I checked, this site was called "Hacker News", not "Bigtech Corporate Employee News".

Re: AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

#140

Post by terlisimo » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

globnomulous wrote: post #115

ho_schi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy AMD or Intel. Not Nvidia. Rationale: Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice, which causes issues with kernel upgrades, various issues (for which you don't get help, because the kernel is now marked as tainted) and problems with Wayland. The later are caused by the fact, that Nvidia refused[2][3…

> Both AMD and Intel provide well maintained open-source drivers for many years[1]. Nvidia doesn't. You need to use closed-source drivers with Nvidia in practice. Is that what this is? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

Nvidia drivers are not open source.

Nvidia has open-sourced the kernel module "driver", which recently have been declared stable enough for general consumption.

But the kernel-mode driver is only a small part of what you would call the graphics card driver, and the bulk of it is still very much a proprietary blob.

The true open source driver for NV cards is Noveau[1] which works ok with older cards but is slow to support newest cards and features. Performance, power mgmt and hw acceleration are usually worse or not working at all compared to the official drivers.

[1] https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html