AMD reveal RDNA 2 with Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT, Radeon RX 6800

I do think:
- Performance difference between AMD and Nvidia is most of the time not relevant unless you go to high end graphic card, and if you do so, you have probably a good reason do to this, and you probably don't expect perfect support on Gnu/Linux.
- If you only do gaming with an Mid end GPU, Go for a previous generation AMD GPU those are most of the time the best supported graphic card, linux driver take time to be available, don't expect day one support on Gnu/Linux.
- AMD opensource GPU driver are great on linux but they do lack some features (opencl support out of the box is poor and of course no CUDA).

I personally go from Nvidia to AMD, i do buy my last 2 graphic card mostly to have a better driver support. I also wanted to ditch the nvidia proprietary driver, which is a pain to maintain in some distro.
The time i do use Nvidia graphic card was not great for gaming on linux, so i don't have much information about really playing on it, but my experience was not really great for a simple usage. I do have some graphic issues with it
The AMD old driver was amazing to me as i can play game like tropico 5 on it, it's really impressive for someone like me that have more or less but game aside because i don't really want to maintain dualboot.
The AMDGPU is another step better. I do tested both RX560 and RX580 on it and it work really really well. I don't push the game to the limit and i don't really care about fps (just want to be able to play normally with normal setting).
So i do expect the nvidia driver has improved from the time i used it, but it's seems to me that part of the success the amdgpu driver is that it don't care about the past and just do the thing in a more linux-friendly way.

My RTX 2080 is (barely) mid-tier 1440p card.

Cmon people, you guys are seriously giving attention to someone who says things like that?
It's a guy saying that you should not buy something because of your ideologies and is defending Nvidia at every possible chance

Async reprojection is a hack to hide the lack of GPU power.

Well, the same can be said about DLSS.

My RTX 2080 is (barely) mid-tier 1440p card.

Cmon people, you guys are seriously giving attention to someone who says things like that?
It's a guy saying that you should not buy something because of your ideologies and is defending Nvidia at every possible chance

Do you have that card? Have you seen any benchmark for it? Do you even know how to choose a GPU? Probably no to all.

Wow, Lunix. You're a real piece of work. Please lighten the tone. Please. Please don't call people liars directly or indirectly. Please stop generalising everything into "for you" and "against you". Please.

The rtx2080 is a 600$ GPU

Oh so I'm the only one who is not allowed to talk back

Well you do so and a lot. The proof is in the pudding.

Every product is different and the ideology is the least important difference between them.

For you. Not for me. The ethos of a company, its ethical stance, and its impact on fostering a cultural shift to open methodologies is the single most important aspect of choosing my hardware. Then it's performance, then it's heat/noise/efficiency. Finally, its price comes into consideration.

It's weird to me that you're commenting on a Linux site and don't understand this, or somewhat buy into it. But I suppose as Linux increases in popularity, there will be more and more people like yourself who don't care about open standards (or least, care as much as others do).

If your number-1 metric is vanity then you're destined to make bad decisions. I can see that you have a 4k display but you use an 5700xt which is not good for 4k at all, it's just an entry-level 1440p card. I don't know how up-to-date your profile is, but you only have one display and you use x11 - wayland and its better multi-display support is the key selling point of AMD.

For most people(>99%) the driver stability, price/performance, performance/watts, warranty programs and supported bonus feae linux and its desktops because of its features(and the lack of some "features"). Developers choosetures will matter the most because they will be the ones delivering value. 3rd party coolers can solve the heat and noise issues.

What is really weird is that linux users supposed to be conscious customers who know that there is more to software and hardware than popularity and other superficial metrics and yet here you are only considering open-sourceness which alone is not real value. Letting a single company be your sole supplier also sounds bad - this is how you get monopolies. Linux will never get really popular if it won't get with the times and deliver actual value instead of advertizing ideologies.

It's not about vanity, it's about control over your own hardware.
And wanting open source seems to have been a good business choice for AMD. Open drivers that don't need external proprietary blobs was a business choice - many data centres or internal company networks wanted precisely that. It was the driving factor behind AMD's decision.

Also, what's the loss in keeping with the ideologies that GNU/Linux is founded upon? Why feel the need to make it more popular if those values are lost? All you end up with is basically Apple or Microsoft, which will defeat the entire point of GNU/Linux. Popularity for its own sake is pointless in my opinion - make it open, make it well, and it will be used on its own merrits. There's a reason that GNU/Linux won the server space.

Linux won the server-space because of its features and performance, and because of companies like redhat and canonical which provide support. GNU/Linux is not a thing for the companies which pay for linux development, they only care about the linux kernel and what runs on it. Healthy competition is the key, not source availability.

Apple and ms are not related because linux is not a company, it's more like an investment between companies against those companies who just want to control the market. If linux gaming and the linux desktop wants to stay alive then it needs to concentrate on value: gaming and desktop UX, not just on open-sourceness. ms also has lots of OSS but they're only doing it to popularize themselves between developers who think OSS = perfect. They're still just a shady company.

We might as well wait for open-source games but we all know that would deliver little to no value for us but it would definitely hurt game developers.

Remember that the main goal of Free Software is being pro-customer - that's the ideology worth to pursue. OSS doesn't always mean that something is pro-customer but it's a good start. Open-source is more relevant if we have an active community which provides extra support - but it is still just one aspect. I use linux and its desktops because of its features(and the lack of some "features"). Most developers also chose linux because of its features and a lot more developers avoid it because of missing features. Linux is just a tool - it is used to get stuff done.

I, for a change, rather not have those mercantilistic (adding continuous value) views on my OS. I appreciate the effort from companies like Valve, Red Hat or Collabora, but they are companies anyway and while they support us, because it benefits them, they will turn the door on us at the very moment it's convenient for them.

I like Linux because with its openness creates an ecosystem that protects itself against that kind of practices, and monopolies, end of life support, etc. As long as there are people interested in a feature, independently of companies support, we will Linux thrive.

Linux won the server race way before RedHat or Canonical were powerful enough to gain the credit. Linux won the server race because people were allowed to make changes, publish them and everyone that used Linux benefited from it. It's a resemblance of human kind. We are able to thrive as a civilization because we can write down our findings and let people develop and learn upon those ideas, passing and expanding the knowledge.

I think you just simply don't know what nvidia-settings can do(more than your average DE's display settings) and think that amd and intel does everything perfectly out-of-the-box. They don't. Linux display configuration is decades behind windows and nvidia-settings is just a small consolation.

lol
no one should have to depend on obscure tweaks for broken stuff. THATS how community driven, free-as-in-freedom, and colloquially developed software works.
unfortunately 3d games are known to be plagued by this, but hey citing it as a clear competitive advantage... jeez

Congrats AMD!

I got myself a 5700XT in early January.
Experience was (still is) absolutely flawless.
Worked out-of-the-box.
Performance is great for playing games in FHD and WQHD high settings.

I can't tell anything about release time but, indeed, I heard it was *rough*. :)

If I'd still be with my Radeon HD 7900 (I had before switching to the 5700XT)
getting one of these new beasts would be a no brainer. :)

Think my 5700 XT will be replaced soonest with RDNA3.

AMD and Lisa Su are really doing a fabulous job.
Btw, the recent news about AMD acquiring Xilinx is also *very* clever imho.
Way more than Nvidia buying ARM - especially when RISC V gains more and more well deserved attention/adoption.
ARM will still be strong for some more years - but they will be challenged.


Last edited by sub on 28 October 2020 at 9:58 pm UTC

While I am impressed with the price/performance with the Big Navi reveal, given how much of a dumpster fire the Nvidia 3000 series launch was with scalpers and the fact that I'm not particularly savvy with Linux, I'm thinking of buying a 5600XT for my new build.

While it's not a huge jump over my R9 Fury (likely 50% performance improvement), it has the advantages of:

- Pop OS! 20.04 will have great support out of the box
- Available at much lower prices (if lower end Big Navi was revealed, this would not be a point)
- Is actually available for purchase

The plan is to take my current PC and basically turn it into a "game console" connected to the TV. The 5600XT will go into the new build and in a year or two, I can move it into the TV PC and get a nicer GPU for my desktop. By that point, Big Navi will likely be better supported and possibly at a nicer price.

Congrats AMD!

I got myself a 5700XT in early January.
Experience was (still is) absolutely flawless.
Worked out-of-the-box.
Performance is great for playing games in FHD and WQHD high settings.

I can't tell anything about release time but, indeed, I heard it was *rough*. :)

Indeed it was. My 5700 has been chugging along for the past few months without any problems and hiccups. And everything was good - until my 5500XT (in a second machine) met kernel 5.8.13 and later. It will disable a second display with any kernel > 5.8.12. No way to activate the second display.
The recipe for problem seems to be the mixture of 2+ displays (resolutions don't matter, one display won't cut it), RDNA and amdgpu. The bugtracker on freedesktop.org is still being fed with rather bizarre bugs.

I'm actually perfectly happy with the performance of my current GTX 1080 Ti, but I'll probably upgrade to an RX 6800 TX anyway once it comes out. It's just getting really tiresome to have to keep worrying about the NVIDIA driver during updates, having things like Wayland be unsupported, "paying" for features that aren't supported by their Linux driver, dealing with weird glitches and even hard lock-ups because everything is some NVIDIA proprietary library (NVENC/NVDEC especially) and worst of all, not having re-projection on my Valve Index because the company I paid for my GPU considers me a second-class citizen.

I've had enough and what AMD just presented is just the kick I needed to get back to AMD for the first time since my ATI Rage 128 :P

The last time I had a ATI card(as they were called back then) it resulted in a "hardware manufacture error". Being boycotting them ever since. I will sooner cut off my leg and eat it before I ever buy a AMD card. I treat them as they don't exist and hate them with a passion. So I have been Nvidia only since that incident in 2009 and seeing people talking about problem with AMD cards under Linux for the first period after release has only confirmed my stance. What can I say, I have grudges...

If the driver breaks with a kernel update then one would assume that it's obvious that it is the kernel which breaks its own interface and not vice versa. The kernel doesn't provide any stable interface. Read about the latest breakage: https://lwn.net/Articles/827596/

There's no point in trying to promote a stable driver binary interface for the Linux kernel because that's never going to happen. It would break too many things the developers care about in order to "fix" something they don't care about at all.

Linux is a cross-platform kernel. A stable driver binary interface is very platform specific. Open source drivers in Linux will do things like allowing a wireless card to run on both an ARM device and an AMD64 device with the same driver. Freezing a binary interface for one platform prevents that. You'd have to maintain separate binary interfaces along with their drivers for different architectures.

A stable driver binary interface would be an anchor weighing down kernel development. Linus Torvalds has made it very clear that it's not going to happen while he's in charge, but everyone deeply involved with Linux kernel development would tend to feel the same way.


Last edited by CFWhitman on 29 October 2020 at 11:43 am UTC

Also, what's that "direct storage" thing? How does GPU supposed to support it?

At some point in the past they even integrated a 1Tb SSD in their GPU to get access to larger storage without being slowed down by the CPU and other components:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3099964/amds-new-ssg-technology-adds-an-ssd-to-its-gpu.html

I guess that may be a variant of this that would still uses computer's SSD (so they don't have to ship it themselves, to reduce price) but in a way performance approach this. There was huge improvements in PCIe and specific AMD technologies for interconnecting things last years.

I know little of this stuff in general, but according to Phoronix, it's built on the PCIe resizable BAR support that seems to have been in the kernel since 2013 and will be supported on Linux with these cards.

The last time I had a ATI card(as they were called back then) it resulted in a "hardware manufacture error". Being boycotting them ever since. I will sooner cut off my leg and eat it before I ever buy a AMD card. I treat them as they don't exist and hate them with a passion. So I have been Nvidia only since that incident in 2009 and seeing people talking about problem with AMD cards under Linux for the first period after release has only confirmed my stance. What can I say, I have grudges...

Hate is bad for your health, be it people or objects, you know? Learn to accept the world around you and you might see it through different eyes ;)

I was really glad to read about RDNA 2 announce today, though my 5700XT is still doing its job pretty good and I have no plans to upgrade it.

Every product is different and the ideology is the least important difference between them.

This statement involves at least two major misconceptions. The first is about the nature of the word "important" as it relates to individuals' choices. Obviously, you cannot define for another person what is important to them. If their values are different from yours, what is important to them will also be different. People have different needs and so on. So for instance, if I'm buying a consumer product, it may be important to me that it be purple (note my handle). But I would not claim to you that purpleness is the most important feature of that consumer product and you are a fool making a mistake if you fail to get a purple one. I accept that, for whatever perverse reason, for many people purpleness just isn't that important. So saying ideology is, or is not, important to someone else's choice is in a basic sense a category error.

The other is about the nature and implications of ideology. An ideology is an understanding of how the world works, in a political and economic sense, combined with some values. If you have an ideology, inevitably it has implications about how the world should work--it might imply that the world should work exactly how it does work, although given how it does work that would be kind of a crappy ideology.
I say "if", but in fact everyone has an ideology. "Pragmatists" who imagine they do not have one are, in reality, just practising some received ideology they do not understand because they absorbed it without thinking about it. You might say instead of them having an ideology, it has them. Refusing to think through what your ideology is or, if you do, to take any actions derived from it, is basically a matter of passivity--accepting that you will be acted on, not an actor, and that the world will be the way all the people who do act cause it to be. Now that's OK in a way, but people who abdicate their agency that way shouldn't be getting on the case of people who have thought things through and do have positions.

Basically, if you haven't reached an understanding of the world or can't be bothered to act in ways consistent with it, shut up when those of us who do know what we're talking about and do have some consistency with our beliefs are talking.

While I am impressed with the price/performance with the Big Navi reveal, given how much of a dumpster fire the Nvidia 3000 series launch was with scalpers and the fact that I'm not particularly savvy with Linux, I'm thinking of buying a 5600XT for my new build.

While it's not a huge jump over my R9 Fury (likely 50% performance improvement), it has the advantages of:

- Pop OS! 20.04 will have great support out of the box
- Available at much lower prices (if lower end Big Navi was revealed, this would not be a point)
- Is actually available for purchase

The plan is to take my current PC and basically turn it into a "game console" connected to the TV. The 5600XT will go into the new build and in a year or two, I can move it into the TV PC and get a nicer GPU for my desktop. By that point, Big Navi will likely be better supported and possibly at a nicer price.

I have a RX470 and honestly, im pretty happy with it. Of course i would love to have a Big Navi with a Ryzen 9 5950X but it would be really expensive and i just dont want to deal with problems of a new release. I got a Ryzen 2700 instead of a 3600 because it was cheaper and all the issues had gone already

The last time I had a ATI card(as they were called back then) it resulted in a "hardware manufacture error". Being boycotting them ever since. I will sooner cut off my leg and eat it before I ever buy a AMD card. I treat them as they don't exist and hate them with a passion. So I have been Nvidia only since that incident in 2009 and seeing people talking about problem with AMD cards under Linux for the first period after release has only confirmed my stance. What can I say, I have grudges...

I know how you feel because i had issues with a Dell with a Radeon 260X in 2015 that it was easier to just deactivate the GPU.

But i have in my main PC a RX470 and it works great. The support is good and all drivers are mature now. I had zero issues whatsoever running the Mesa drivers.

If you buy a new card from AMD and decide to use Mesa, there will be issues, but a older card will work just fine

Let's see, with all of my tax returns coming in the next months, I should be able to finally finish out my existing x570 build with an Asus PG43UQ 43” 4K, a 5900X, a Sabrent 1tb Rocket Plus PCIE4 NVME, and 6800XT, OR MAYBE a 6900XT. Not sure, have to wait and see if the performance justifies the price. Not buying anything until February probably so should have the best build relative to what's available that I've ever had. Ihaven't decided on the distro yet. Still leaning towards Fedora 33, but PopOS is tempting.

It's actually kind of sad. I don't game anywhere near what I used to, especially not AAA devs, but I am doing video editing, and 4K Windows games via Steamplay need all the GPU horsepower you can bring.