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AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

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

#181
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.

Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.

The kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.

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

#182
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am running Wayland on a 3090 Ti and there are zero tearing issues in KDE plasma 6.2. I do not know what you mean by “issues with newer hardware”. It has always worked just as well on Linux as it worked on Windows as far as I know.

The 3090Ti, while still an excellent card is hardly "newer hardware" at this point in 2025.

That is irrelevant considering the quote was “those cards frequently have issues with newer hardware”. I was asking what this referenced newer hardware is.

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

#183
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has long been ahead of AMD. They seem to be close to parity right now thanks to Valve’s efforts, but that has historically not been the case. AMD was the one that needed a decade to catch up until Valve started helping. I wonder if the Radeon driver has gotten reliable GPU restart support. The GPU becoming unrecoverable if a shader crashed was long a major issue on Radeon on Linux, and I am not sure if valve f…

Your info looks a decade old. AMD driver on Linux are better that NVIDIA. They simply just work out of the box.

I find Nvidia has a great out of box experience too, or as close to out of box that it can be when you run Gentoo like I do. Gentoo needs to have the drivers added to it. This applies to both AMD and Nvidia equally, since a basic Gentoo install has no graphics support.

Anyway, Valve has improved the AMD community driver on Linux, but I have yet to hear any news on RADV being able to recover from GPU hangs. Nvidia’s driver can. The last I looked a few years ago, the security guys were begging the AMD driver developers to look at static analyzer reports. Meanwhile, the open source driver that Nvidia released shows that Nvidia uses static analyzers given that it has preprocessor directives from Coverity. I really would not regard AMD as being at Nvidia’s level yet on Linux, even if it is coming close.

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

#184
I'm pretty torn to self-host AI 70 B models on Ryzen AI Max with 128gb of ram. The market seems to be evolving fast. Outside of Apple, this is the first product to really compete in this category Self-host AI. So... I think a second generation will be significantly better than what's currently on offer today. Rationale below...

For a max spec processor with ram at $2,000, this seems like a decent deal given today's market. However, this might age very fast for three reasons.

Reason 1: LPDDR6 may debut in the next year or two this could bring massive improvements to memory bandwidth and capacity for soldered on memory.

LPDDR6 vs LPDDR5 - Data bus width - 24 bits, 16 bits Burst length - 24 bits, 15 bits Memory bandwidth - Up to 38.4 GB/s, Up to 6.7 GB/s

- Camm ram may or may not be maintain signal integrity as memory bandwidth increases. Until I see it implemented for a AI use-case in a cost-effective manner, I am skeptical.

Reason 2: - It's a laptop chip with limited PCI lanes and reduced power envelope. Theoretically, a desktop chip could have better performance, more lanes, socketable (Although, I don't think I've seen a socketed CPU with soldered RAM)

Reason 3: In addition, what does hardware look like being repurposed in the future compared to alternatives?

- Unlike desktop or server counterparts which can have a higher cpu core count, PCEe/IO Expansion, this processor with its motherboard is limited on re-purposing later down the line as a server to self-host other software besides AI. I suppose could be turned into a overkill, NAS with ZFS and HBA Single Controller Card in new case.

- Buying into the framework desktop is pretty limited based on the form factor. Next generation might be able to include a 16x slot fully populated, a 10G nic. That seems about it if they're going to maintain the backward compatibility philosophy given the case form factor.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sup…

I see. Thanks for explaining.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen way more Nvidia specific issues in the mpv bug tracker than AMD Could that maybe be because Nvidia now has almost an order of magnitude more customers? I think they closed 2024 with 90% market share.

mpv is still very much Linux majority and AMD is (relatively) more popular on that platform, I'd wager.

It's possible they have a higher percentage of AMD users than other communities, but I highly doubt given the market share that it's statistically possible for AMD to outnumber Nvidia.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I applaud you for avoiding latest-and-greatest syndrome, but even upgrading to an older CPU generation would be a significant boost. Being out of a job for a while makes me very loathe to upgrade hardware that still works OK. That 1800X still does what I want it to do, and does it 'fast enough', though how far into the future that will last is unclear. Cyberpunk 2077 being the most demanding game that I've played p…

I feel that. It's difficult to justify any new hardware until I'm in a better place; while it'd be nice, I'm not suffering enough to /need/ a new system. Until the beginning of 2020, during university, I was still on a 3930K from launch-day in ~2011 and GTX 680. Honestly, I'm not sure I would've bothered if it weren't also for the fact that I wanted to be able to test AVX2 implementations of some of my code without r…

Oops, realized too late that I deleted a sentence by accident; I gave the GPU to my younger brother.

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

#188
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.

The kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.

You're confusing the userland graphics libraries (Mesa) and the kernel drivers (nouveau etc). The kernel ones are all GPL.

The userland libraries are MIT because everything links to them, including propriety software.

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

#189

I'm really intrigued to get one, but where is the 32GB version for all the LLM goodness?

I'd rather have a $3000 one with 80GB

If I'm spending $3k, I'm probably getting a Nvidia project digits box with 128GB.

Then again, if the tokens/s of digits is comparable to a M4 Max 128GB, then I'm getting a MBP instead.

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

#190
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 real…

Did you report the issue?
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