I just purchased a 6800 XT last week, so this has been my first experience with a Radeon card in many years. One key thing to know is that there is no official graphical control panel from AMD, so you'll be doing a long of config file work. I personally enjoy that part of Linux anyway, so it wasn't bad for me.

Desktop usage seems to work light years better than Nvidia. I had so many hacks with my Nvidia cards to keep apps from tearing, animations not performing well, etc. AMD's desktop support seems to be flawless. Mind you, I couldn't use the built-in Mesa driver because it's not available for my card yet, but the open AMDGPU driver from AMD's website worked.

Freesync is the biggest pain. I just finally got it working last night after I found out you have to disable compositing to get it to work. I believe it does not work in windowed mode.

Performance wise, it's hard to tell because I went from a GTX 1070 to an RX 6800 XT. Everything is maxed out on every game for me at 1440p. I soon realized I had to download vulkan drivers separately (something that was in the release notes for the driver but not explained well). Most of the ins and outs I had to learn from forums like this one, so there is a bit of a learning curve. Obviously, it'll be easy for older cards since the driver is literally built into the kernel.

If there's anything I didn't answer, I'd be happy to share more of my experience.

Quoting: melkemindMind you, I couldn't use the built-in Mesa driver because it's not available for my card yet, but the open AMDGPU driver from AMD's website worked.

According to Liam's launch day article, Linux 5.9, Mesa 20.2 and LLVM 11 should suffice. They've all been out for a while.

You can get the latest kernels on Ubuntu derivatives from Ubuntu's kernel PPA (easy to install and manage with the aptly named Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Installer ), and Mesa + LLVM from Kisak's Mesa PPA. If you don't like messing with PPAs, I guess the proprietary AMDGPU driver is a valid option.

Quoting: melkemindFreesync is the biggest pain. I just finally got it working last night after I found out you have to disable compositing to get it to work.

You probably want compositing to be disabled for full-screen anyway, because then you'll have control over Vsync, lower latency, and better framepacing. In vanilla KWin, you'll want to enable "Allow applications to block compositing". There's also the kwin-lowlatency fork which I highly recommend, as it runs compositing at the display refresh rate and reintroduces the option to automatically disable compositing for full-screen applications.

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: HihiDanniMainly I want to be able to force anisotropic filtering to 16x for all programs

That can be done like this:

# Vulkan
RADV_TEX_ANISO=16

# OpenGL
AMD_TEX_ANISO=16 

So I put this in my .profile and that should take care of it right? Like:

# Vulkan
export RADV_TEX_ANISO=16

# OpenGL
export AMD_TEX_ANISO=16

Quoting: Sojiro84So I put this in my .profile and that should take care of it right? Like:

# Vulkan
export RADV_TEX_ANISO=16

# OpenGL
export AMD_TEX_ANISO=16

Yes, if you want that to be just always enabled for everything. I usually put such exports in my game launchers scripts.

Quoting: HihiDanni

Quoting: melkemindFreesync is the biggest pain. I just finally got it working last night after I found out you have to disable compositing to get it to work.

You probably want compositing to be disabled for full-screen anyway, because then you'll have control over Vsync, lower latency, and better framepacing. In vanilla KWin, you'll want to enable "Allow applications to block compositing". There's also the kwin-lowlatency fork which I highly recommend, as it runs compositing at the display refresh rate and reintroduces the option to automatically disable compositing for full-screen applications.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I've just been doing Alt+Shift+F12 every time I want to play a game. Having it done automatically would be awesome.

Yeah, that's a common point - to enable adaptive sync, you need to disable compositing if you have X11 session. I just also do with Alt+Shift+F12.

"Allow applications to block composting" setting is fine and works with native games or video players, but it doesn't work for Wine games somehow. So I just do it manually in such cases.

Last edited by Shmerl on 26 November 2020 at 10:58 pm UTC

Quoting: ShmerlYeah, that's a common point - to enable adaptive sync, you need to disable compositing if you have X11 session. I just also do with Alt+Shift+F12.

"Allow applications to block composting" setting is fine and works with native games or video players, but it doesn't work for Wine games somehow. So I just do it manually in such cases.

You can disable compositing on a per-app basis by right-clicking the titlebar and going to More Actions -> Configure Special Application Settings. There you can add a "Block compositing" property. Make sure it's set to "Force" (not "Do Not Affect"), and "Yes".