Congrats! I went from a GTX 950 to an RX 6600 early this summer and have no regrets so far (other that there's no nvidia-smi equivalent I know of).

Seeing you're using a flavour of Ubuntu, too: I'm running a mainline kernel (5.18.12) and the mesa drivers from the kisak-mesa PPA on Ubuntu LTS 22.04. (And I probably should upgrade that kernel). Works flawlessly.

Welcome to Team Red. We have cookies.

Congrats! Hope the install goes smoothly.

I really hope to join team AMD soon, NVIDIA is driving me nuts. It keeps disabling my second monitor and is just becoming a nuisance.

Congrats! I went from a GTX 950 to an RX 6600 early this summer and have no regrets so far (other that there's no nvidia-smi equivalent I know of).

Seeing you're using a flavour of Ubuntu, too: I'm running a mainline kernel (5.18.12) and the mesa drivers from the kisak-mesa PPA on Ubuntu LTS 22.04. (And I probably should upgrade that kernel). Works flawlessly.

I don't know what the nvidia-smi is, so I'm not going to miss it, lol. I am curious about the "kisak-mesa PPA" you mentioned, though. I'll look into it. I like hearing your recent move from NVIDIA to Mesa was a good experience. Thank you for sharing that.

Last edited by Nanobang on 6 Jan 2023 at 1:34 pm UTC

Welcome to Team Red. We have cookies.

Thanks Hamish for that nice welcome! :)

I really hope to join team AMD soon, NVIDIA is driving me nuts. It keeps disabling my second monitor and is just becoming a nuisance.

I've never been aware of problems with NVIDIA per se, but hearing your display problem reminds me that I've probably had them and not known they were caused by NVIDIA. When you do join Team AMD, get up with Hamish. He has cookies.

Your life will get easier, with low level drivers in kernel, and graphics libraries (Mesa) in your distribution (though you may want to use a PPA for Mesa in *buntu)

We now have the "libglvnd" (gl vendor neutral dispatch) so the old problem of the Nvidia driver breaking Xorg/Mesa doesn't happen anymore. It should be an easy transition.

I know it may make you apprehensive as you've relied on Nvidia for years, but nowadays, that's not necessarily where it's at for Linux anymore (in general). Mesa/amdgpu has gotten pretty good.

.. well, there's Mesa. It's just always seemed just a little wooly compared to NVIDIA's drivers.

Meaning Mesa is "wooly" in the same way a great big powerful, ferocious (but still dependable) mammoth might be? Right?

If not I fear no cookies can be provided,

Meaning Mesa is "wooly" in the same way a great big powerful, ferocious (but still dependable) mammoth might be? Right?

YES! Well ... no. Because then Mesa would be extinct, and that would suck 'cause I just bought my first AMD GPU.

We now have the "libglvnd" (gl vendor neutral dispatch) so the old problem of the Nvidia driver breaking Xorg/Mesa doesn't happen anymore. It should be an easy transition.

I expect it won't be too much of a learning curve, truly. I'm curious about this "libglvnd," though. Why/how is an Nvidia driver in a position to break Xorg/Mesa if an AMD GPU is being used with Mesa? Again, just curious. :)

Why/how is an Nvidia driver in a position to break Xorg/Mesa if an AMD GPU is being used with Mesa? Again, just curious. :)

In the old days, installing the proprietary Nvidia driver would replace your graphics libraries. If you installed it from Nvidia archive (rather than stagnating distro packages) you had problems if you didn't know what to do (reinstall mesa packages and possibly some Xorg packages)

This made it more difficult to switch to a non-nvidia card.

For some years now, Nvidia has pushed distributors all to use the "GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch" library, libglvnd which provides the vendor neutral parts of opengl like libGL and libGLX, handling the opengl calls and dispatches them to the appropriate library functions for your card(s). Therefore you can have Nvidia and Mesa (Intel, AMD, Nouveau, llvmpipe/OSmesa etc.) graphics libraries on the same system.

We also use a similar dispatch for Vulkan, the vulkan-icd-loader ("installable client driver") so we can have multiple vulkan implementations at the same time.

Welcome to AMD and Mesa!

It is done. GTX 1070 out, Radeon 6600 XT in.

I can't be certain, but I want to say that overall the graphics appear smoother, more fluid. Of course it could just be my imagination, looking for evidence of the upgrade, but I'm okay with that. It makes me happy to imagine that's the case.

Tonight I'll be playing Saint's Row 3 on Proton with a buddy. I'm especially interested to see if things've improved graphically. SR3 on Proton has had annoying graphical issues for me---lags, stuttering---and occasionally the graphics just freeze (even as the rest of the game continues to run). Sometimes it's temporary, other times I have to restart the game. I tried all sorts of things, but the best I could get was reduce the number and length of the problems (OP).

Somewhere along the line I decided to believe the CPU and GPU just didn't communicate well. It was more a notion than any kind of theory, really, but it was a notion that could be notionally tested with an AMD GPU---which I'd been wanting to do anyway. Yay! Win-win I guess ... Or it will be after spending a few hours with SR3 tonight. I'll let y'all know. :)

Oh, and the cookies? Muy delish.

Last edited by Nanobang on 18 Jan 2023 at 7:00 pm UTC

I'm excited and nervous. Excited by a better card than my current GTX 1070 (for about the same price, or less, I might add) and nervous because I did very little due diligence and ... well, there's Mesa. It's just always seemed just a little wooly compared to NVIDIA's drivers. Guess I'll find out. Wish me well.

Sending them well-wishes ^_^

Recently acquired an rx6600 for, as they say in my home-country, an apple and an egg. Literally zero problems with the drivers out-of-the-box with the latest mint xfce.

Lutris is being useless for me, however. But that's another story...

I'm excited and nervous. Excited by a better card than my current GTX 1070 (for about the same price, or less, I might add) and nervous because I did very little due diligence and ... well, there's Mesa. It's just always seemed just a little wooly compared to NVIDIA's drivers. Guess I'll find out. Wish me well.

Sending them well-wishes ^_^

Recently acquired an rx6600 for, as they say in my home-country, an apple and an egg. Literally zero problems with the drivers out-of-the-box with the latest mint xfce.

Lutris is being useless for me, however. But that's another story...

Thanks for the well-wishes. :) My experience with Radeon so far has also been a good one, beginning with a sale price < $300 US---indeed, for the price of an "apple and an egg"...(I like that saying). Saint's Row 3 now runs best on nothing more than Steam Runtime, I think, stuttering a little bit when characters are near wate, but nothing like what I saw with my NVIDIA card.

And, if it makes you feel a bit better, Lutris has never been anything but useless for me, either. ;)

Lutris is useful for me, for a front end to quickly manage wine prefixes and runtimes. For example it symlinks my choice of DXVK and vkd3d-proton builds into the prefixes. I just manually generate them and install games and use winetricks appropriately, but it's still better to have that user interface. I don't use most of the stuff in Lutris.

I'll say that I do believe that a lot of stuff in it doesn't work as expected anymore though. Like install scripts and things and from what I can see, they haven't updated our runtimes in some time, but rely on those Proton-GE Lutris runners. Again, it's still good to have the UI for using my own wine and runtime drop-ins.

I would not be surprised if it's a huge project that's lost some momentum and has fewer participants. It's of course way more than just wine games, it accommodates many different runner types. Who works on integrating all that shit? lol

Something like Bottles might be more polished, but I haven't tried it because the dependencies are too onerous for me and I prefer a simpler tool like Lutris. (I'd rather use it the way I do anyway)

I have really liked Lutris and I'd be very sad if it went to Hell. I don't think so, I got a new release not long ago. It's still being worked on.

Last edited by Grogan on 25 Jan 2023 at 3:33 am UTC

Oh, and speaking of Saints Row The Third, that game recently stopped working for me on Steam. I think it was related to that CEG DRM that the Steam version still has. The same thing happened to a friend (it was he who got me to test it). It had been maybe 10 days or so since I last played it at the time (on christmas day with my nephew lol), so it was recent breakage.

I'm talking about the Windows version of Saints Row The Third. The Linux port stopped working for me a long time before this.

I got pissed off and went and re-bought it on GoG and it worked perfectly, out of the box, with my system wine-tkg. (Set up with Lutris). I just had to go fish my game data out of steam/userdata/steamid/appid directories and drop it in. My friend did the same, he used lutris-7.2-2 for his wine runner.

We're both on Arch Linux(ish) environments.

That's a game I never want to lose because of stupid DRM. I don't want that newer remaster of it either (the current original one has been enhanced a few times). I've been doing that a lot with my old favourites, they are usually quite inexpensive to repurchase on GoG and then I download and back up the installer archives.

It's also good to have games for if Internet service is out. It happened a few weeks ago (it felt like a maintenance window, at the time they usually do it) and I just smiled and fired up Lutris with all my GoG games. It turned out to be a near 4 hour outage, but I had lots to entertain myself with and nothing else to distract me.

Last edited by Grogan on 25 Jan 2023 at 3:59 am UTC

I'm excited and nervous. Excited by a better card than my current GTX 1070 (for about the same price, or less, I might add) and nervous because I did very little due diligence and ... well, there's Mesa. It's just always seemed just a little wooly compared to NVIDIA's drivers. Guess I'll find out. Wish me well.

Fear of the Mesa experience...? I don't understand. Fear of what? You don't have to do anything with Mesa. I don't even have an X11 config file.