Currently I don't think AMD has anything better than a GTX 1080. The Vega RX64 is its equivalent, I believe, but in general it's a bad time to buy new GPUs due to the increased prices from all the miners buying cards. I'd suggest looking at benchmarks of both the Vega 56 and 64 if you're looking at the top end of their offerings but there's a Vega refresh that may come out this year and their next-gen Navi cards will be out next year.

As for installation: it should work out of the box in most distros with a recent kernel and Mesa version for most cards (my RX 480 needed no configuration at all on Arch).

The upcoming kernel 4.15 will have a the much-awaited DC/DAL code merged in from AMD, adding a few missing features for newer cards including the Vega series. Ubuntu tends to have slightly older kernels so you may want to install a newer one, but it's best to ask someone who actually uses Ubuntu how to do that. There's also a pair of PPAs for newer Mesa versions, but that's something you'll probably want to ask someone else about.

Like what BTRE has said, The rx64 is near as damn it equivalent, tad quicker at times.(see Superposition bench thread )

It's also a bad time for any GPU especially a AMD card, My RX64 has tripled in price! I don't envy anyone trying to buy/build a computer in today's climate.

Can't comment on *buntu type distros but on Antergos AMD cards are painless up to the Vega's as in, put card in and boot, The Vega's require either the AMD-staging kernel or just released 4.15 kernel.

One thing to note is power consumption. Under load, Vega64 will consume about 30% more power compared to a 1080. If that's not important to you and you are only looking for performance, it should perform somewhere between a 1070Ti and 1080.

Indeed, for decent power consumption with AMD, we need to wait for 7nm Vega. So far it seems it's coming only in 2019, but may be AMD will push things a bit.

QuoteI'm also curious on how the install process of AMD drivers and the update is. With NVIDIA it's quite simple, on Ubuntu 16.04 at least, as you just plug in your card, add the ppa graphics-drivers, update, enable it from "Additional Drivers" and you're set. Is it just as simple with AMD?

You're using Ubuntu? No work to install at all. Nothing to click, nothing to enter. The way that Intel and AMD handle Linux graphics drivers should be the gold standard.

Quoting: GustyGhostYou're using Ubuntu? No work to install at all. Nothing to click, nothing to enter. The way that Intel and AMD handle Linux graphics drivers should be the gold standard.

Except in case of Ubuntu LTE which ships outdated Mesa. There more steps are needed to keep things up to date.

Honestly, I would wait for Navi since you have a 1080 already. I don't think Vega will be worth it, specially at the current prices, unless you REALLY REALLY want a GPU with FOSS driver NOW.

As for driver support, AMD is quite painless here. Put the card in - done. Note that for Vega you currently have to install a new kernel on Ubuntu, but 18.04 will bring it by default. Manjaro already has it, Arch + Antergos should follow soon (if they don't have it yet). Basically, anything that has Kernel 4.15+ will be fine.

Quoting: GuestThe simple answer is DON'T! AMD sucks. While lots of debate on how far the FOSS drivers have come AMD leaves their products to die WAY too fast. I can install a 15 year old nVidia card in a machine and install the open source or nVidia made drivers with ease. With AMD there are no drivers unless you use a super old distro or the FOSS drivers that do not give you the bells and whistles you want from a high end GPU. I've used AMD for nearly 20 years. I remember when the ATI cards with 8mb of RAM where this amazing thing replacing all the voodoo cards. Now...I won't touch AMD/ATI/Radeon again unless they drastically change their attitude towards legacy products (which they seem to think is anything more than a month old) and simply keeping things up with new kernel/distro releases in general.

More so there is nothing really better than a 1080. You will have to wait a number of years before anything will "feel" like an upgrade. Most you will see is some lame 2-15 FPS boosts here and there. Completely not worth the money, unless you're rich. Though you might be rich if you can afford to replace a 1080 "just because."

Basically, it seems you are focusing on the proprietary driver here, which did drop pre-GCN support in favour of a more unified driver approach. But that doesn't mean that there isn't any support for the Terascale stuff. The HD 5000 line came out in 2009 and the R600G open driver you use with those is still getting updates, although at a reduced pace and I'm pretty sure the older drivers haven't been totally deprecated even though they don't get active updates. And if I take a look at the latest Nvidia driver (390.25), their support goes back to GeForce 400 series, which came out in 2010. I guess Nvidia also lets their products die? :P

PS: You really thought bringing the open source Nvidia driver into the conversation would sound convincing?

Quoting: GuestThe simple answer is DON'T! AMD sucks. While lots of debate on how far the FOSS drivers have come AMD leaves their products to die WAY too fast. I can install a 15 year old nVidia card in a machine and install the open source or nVidia made drivers with ease. With AMD there are no drivers unless you use a super old distro or the FOSS drivers that do not give you the bells and whistles you want from a high end GPU. I've used AMD for nearly 20 years. I remember when the ATI cards with 8mb of RAM where this amazing thing replacing all the voodoo cards. Now...I won't touch AMD/ATI/Radeon again unless they drastically change their attitude towards legacy products (which they seem to think is anything more than a month old) and simply keeping things up with new kernel/distro releases in general.

I think you are getting a few things mixed up here. We have a very capable and fast FOSS OpenGL driver for GCN cards, and pre-GCN cards are still supported by the R600g driver, which still gets updates and is almost at OpenGL 4.5!

The thing is, the driver for those old cards moves at a slower pace, because those cards are dinosaurs in terms of gaming. Just to put it into perspective, before I bought my gaming PC and the AMD RX480 with it, I had a gaming laptop with an AMD Radeon HD 7830M. That is a part from 2012 - or six years ago now.

I remember using Mesa to play Star Trek Online using Wine and other games that we had during that time on that card, it was quite capable under Linux. But as a gamer, I wouldn't use this card today. Simply because it is now a few generations old, and the hardware doesn't have the required features to properly accelerate modern games.

Remember that GPUs are not general purpose CPUs, they don't work like that. They are highly specialized chips that contain hardware to accelerate games from it's time, newer games will use new tech that just isn't present (or present but slower) in the older card's chip. If your previous-gen GPU, say runs at the same memory/GPU speed your newer gen card works, your newer gen card will still beat it on modern games that use these features. And those games will run slower on your older gen GPU.

You simply can't say you got a high end Nvidia or AMD card years ago that is now a few generations old and still claim it is a high end card. It may have been high end for it's time, like my 7830M, and during that time I enjoyed the card.

Quoting: GuestThe simple answer is DON'T! AMD sucks. While lots of debate on how far the FOSS drivers have come AMD leaves their products to die WAY too fast.

Where did you get that from? Mesa supports many old AMD cards.