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[Rant]: RX 5700... a frustrating experience
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tuubi Jan 11, 2020
As far as I understand, OpenCL should work with AMD's proprietary driver, and the OpenCL part seems to be installable separately. So no FOSS support yet, but at least you should be able to use OpenCL. Arch users can probably still use this AUR package despite it having no maintainer apparently.
Tuxee Jan 11, 2020
I have OpenCL up and running. I picked the required deb packages from here
https://www.amd.com/de/support/kb/release-notes/rn-amdgpu-unified-navi-linux
but did not install the packages themselves (since I'm not sure whether this breaks my Mesa 20.0 setup). Instead I copied the required files from the opencl* packages to their intended directories.
This whole procedure is ugly as hell, but darktable, blender and Geekbench all detect it properly.
sub Jan 11, 2020
Quoting: tuubiAs far as I understand, OpenCL should work with AMD's proprietary driver, and the OpenCL part seems to be installable separately. So no FOSS support yet, but at least you should be able to use OpenCL. Arch users can probably still use this AUR package despite it having no maintainer apparently.

OMG. That disappointing, tbh.
sub Jan 11, 2020
Quoting: TuxeeI have OpenCL up and running. I picked the required deb packages from here
https://www.amd.com/de/support/kb/release-notes/rn-amdgpu-unified-navi-linux
but did not install the packages themselves (since I'm not sure whether this breaks my Mesa 20.0 setup). Instead I copied the required files from the opencl* packages to their intended directories.
This whole procedure is ugly as hell, but darktable, blender and Geekbench all detect it properly.

Will try.
Scoopta Jan 12, 2020
As someone who upgraded from an R9 Fury to an RX 5700 XT I'm not sure I can agree I've had the same issues...or any at all for that matter. There is exactly one issue I've experienced that was caused by my upgrade, well 2. First issue is ESO in DXVK renders literally broken. Unplayable, but that's the only game I experience that with. DXVK and vulkan seem to work everywhere else so that appears to be a quirk of that game more than anything terrible to write home about the driver state. It is a new card so one game breaking is tolerable. The second issue I've noticed is wl_drm appears to have a few bugs that prevent literally only 1 wayland program I can find from running and it's not even something I actually use, just something I've been testing for a friend but it does happen where it didn't on the old card. That's it, no crashes or anything. The firmware, mesa, and kernel things are to be expected. Unfortunately the way the Linux driver ecosystem is setup rolling release distros are best for new hardware support. I don't see that changing and personally I don't see it as a huge deal especially when non-rolling distros usually don't have the latest nvidia drivers in repo anyway and DKMS is a straight evil invention. In any case it's not friendly to users on non-rolling releases when they want new hardware which does tend to be the majority of new Linux users who aren't as able to cope with the downsides. As far as your OpenCL complaints...no mesa doesn't have OpenCL...but ROCm does exist and is pretty good in my experience, even has tensor flow support. You are not required by any means to use the proprietary runtime to get OpenCL working. Maybe I've had less issues cause I'm on a rolling distro? I'm not really sure, but aside from a bug here and there which I expect on brand new hardware I've had no notable issues and I LOVE this card. Sold my Fury to a friend who used to have nvidia and he's had a really good experience with AMD as well.

EDIT: I've been corrected, ROCm doesn't work =(

Last edited by Scoopta on 12 January 2020 at 9:08 pm UTC
Tuxee Jan 12, 2020
How do you get ROCm to work with a RX 5700, when statements like these are out:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/819#issuecomment-532886041

and looking it up

https://rocm.github.io/hardware.html

A working ROCm on an RX 5700 would be nothing short of a miracle.

Second point (and I think I stated this in my original post): It's not that the card doesn't work at all. It's just some heavy lifting on an 18.04 Ubuntu (which is (a) probably the most popular distro and (b) the "recommended distro for the official AMD driver). Once you get it running everything's "quite ok". BUT - and that's my biggest gripe - it is the instability of the setup:
18.04/Kernel 5.3/Mesa 20.0 - works (my current setup)
18.04/Kernel 5.4/Mesa 20.0 - nope
19.10/Kernel 5.3/Mesa 20.0 - nope
19.10/Kernel 5.4/Mesa 20.0 - works, BUT (again) SotTR gives me 22fps vs. the 100 in the working 18.04 setup
AND you have to be cautious about "other things installed" - the working 19.10 setup crashed with lm-sensors/sensors installed. (At this point I might start to mix up some of the working/not-working configurations, but several days of tinkering are hands-down a PITA.)
OTOH: Ubuntu has a graphics drivers PPA which provide the most recent NVidia drivers pretty much immediately after release:

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa?field.series_filter=bionic

Now that's something I consider simple...
Scoopta Jan 12, 2020
Quoting: TuxeeHow do you get ROCm to work with a RX 5700, when statements like these are out:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/819#issuecomment-532886041

and looking it up

https://rocm.github.io/hardware.html

A working ROCm on an RX 5700 would be nothing short of a miracle.

Second point (and I think I stated this in my original post): It's not that the card doesn't work at all. It's just some heavy lifting on an 18.04 Ubuntu (which is (a) probably the most popular distro and (b) the "recommended distro for the official AMD driver). Once you get it running everything's "quite ok". BUT - and that's my biggest gripe - it is the instability of the setup:
18.04/Kernel 5.3/Mesa 20.0 - works (my current setup)
18.04/Kernel 5.4/Mesa 20.0 - nope
19.10/Kernel 5.3/Mesa 20.0 - nope
19.10/Kernel 5.4/Mesa 20.0 - works, BUT (again) SotTR gives me 22fps vs. the 100 in the working 18.04 setup
AND you have to be cautious about "other things installed" - the working 19.10 setup crashed with lm-sensors/sensors installed. (At this point I might start to mix up some of the working/not-working configurations, but several days of tinkering are hands-down a PITA.)
OTOH: Ubuntu has a graphics drivers PPA which provide the most recent NVidia drivers pretty much immediately after release:

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa?field.series_filter=bionic

Now that's something I consider simple...
Well I failed to live by my own moto on that one. I did no research about ROCm and don't actually use OpenCL other than the one time I wanted to test ROCm, I honestly just assumed it worked without looking into it. So yes, you're right, you need the proprietary runtime which sucks. Also I can't speak to ubuntu but at least for me that's been my experience. On my distro the only thing that was missing when I bought my card was the firmware, kernel was already in the repos, same with mesa. All I did was unpack the firmware from kernel.org and everything worked great but again that's probably cause I'm on a rolling release. For me it was simple, also I have lm-sensors and it works correctly, giving me all my temps for my card just fine so not sure what would cause that. Also looking at the recommended distro for the proprietary drivers is irrelevant when using mesa however you're probably right in calling it the most popular. I'm surprised ubuntu has this many issues with it. Then again the entire reason I moved to rolling release was because I had issues playing games on stable many many years ago. I think I had an HD 7870 at the time. Honestly I don't know why you've had a poor experience but I can certainly say I didn't. The unfortunate thing about this...with the exception of OpenCL, is this isn't even AMDs issue. That is to say it's an issue with the Linux ecosystem as a whole considering you can have 2 people with the same hardware on different distros with such wildly different results. I might try ubuntu in a container or dual boot.

Last edited by Scoopta on 12 January 2020 at 9:27 pm UTC
Tuxee Jan 12, 2020
With lm-sensors I got flooded with AMDGPU: [poweplay] ... messages. Right now I think I'm gonna leave it there and once 5.5 is out I'll switch to the in-development 20.04 Ubuntu and see how that works out.
Scoopta Jan 12, 2020
Quoting: TuxeeWith lm-sensors I got flooded with AMDGPU: [poweplay] ... messages. Right now I think I'm gonna leave it there and once 5.5 is out I'll switch to the in-development 20.04 Ubuntu and see how that works out.
Alright, hopefully things smooth out. I hate to see people having bad experiences with FOSS and that's ultimately the biggest difference between nvidia and AMD.
tuubi Jan 12, 2020
Quoting: TuxeeOTOH: Ubuntu has a graphics drivers PPA which provide the most recent NVidia drivers pretty much immediately after release:

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa?field.series_filter=bionic

Now that's something I consider simple...
For me it was as simple as switching to Kisak's Mesa PPA (was using Padoka's PPA with my previous Polaris card), and everything just worked. I'm sorry you've had a difficult time, but you shouldn't assume everyone else will.


BTW: Having lm-sensors installed or running sensors in the terminal does not cause powerplay errors for me on Mint 19 / Linux 5.4.10 / Mesa 19.3.2. I thought the problem was with some desktop hardware monitor applications?
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