I suppose the teams developing the hardware are much heavier on resources. Makes you wonder why the can't dish out this little extra money for a reasonable software team.

Quoting: YoRHa-2B- but it's impossible to recommend AMD GPUs at the moment. They are doing the best they can to live up the memes of their drivers being shit, and if they don't get it together some time next year, I'll have no choice but to jump ship again.

Harsh, but probably fair as well, especially since there are issues on Windows too. I really wanted to swap over to AMD, but all these driver issues, with no solution in sight, makes it very hard. Pretty sad really, when the products themselves seem to be really good.

This is going *way* back, to when ATI existed and I had a Radeon 8500 card. Back then the drivers weren't exactly up to snuff either, and I remember we used an alternative called Omega or some such. Those drivers gave much better performance in games. Does something like that exist today?

Last edited by Pangaea on 12 Nov 2019 at 5:07 am UTC

Quoting: PangaeaThis is going *way* back, to when ATI existed and I had a Radeon 8500 card. Back then the drivers weren't exactly up to snuff either, and I remember we used an alternative called Omega or some such. Those drivers gave much better performance in games. Does something like that exist today?

radv is an alternative to AMD's provided Vulkan driver (amdvlk). And it's high quality.

I can play TW3 using RX 5700XT (with radv) just fine. While amdvlk produces this:



As for kernel issues, they are going to iron them out over time. 5.4-rc7 already got better.

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 Nov 2019 at 5:09 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlAs for kernel issues, they are going to iron them out over time. 5.4-rc7 already got better.

Ah the good ol' AMD Fine Wine ...
Seriously though, Navi's launch on Linux could have been better.

Probably good for AMD that nobody anywhere are writing about this, apart from the odd post here and on reddit (and we know what happens there...). Otherwise their sales on Black Friday and towards Xmas would probably be impacted more. I hoped the problems would be solved by then, but it sadly doesn't look very likely.

It's so great to have AMD back and some real competition again, but they really need to get their drivers in order.

Quoting: PangaeaI hoped the problems would be solved by then, but it sadly doesn't look very likely.

My estimation is that kernel 5.4.x with Mesa 19.3.x will be good enough. These are due to be out soon. Though for Mesa llvm10 so far is reported to have most bug fixes.

Last edited by Shmerl on 12 Nov 2019 at 10:14 pm UTC

Noticed a firmware-upgrade of sorts in the update manager today. Any good news or is this unrelated?

Firmware for Radeon RX5700 (navi10) missing / boot failure
(LP: #1848848)
- amdgpu: add initial navi10 firmware

Firmware has been out for a while. The only recent update is something related to hardware video acceleation (VCN).

I check out the relevant bug thread now and then... shots fired recently. And rather understandably to be honest. If I had had this card for months without any real progress on fixing such elemental issues, I'd be pissed off as well :(

(edit: first quote got auto-hidden; expand to view it)

Is this seriously what AMD calls "support"? No offense but this is ridiculous, this card has been out for four months and it still can't even browse firefox reliably, even after these "workarounds" and "patches".

Then we waited two months for the drivers to even get properly released, and all this wait was for nothing because the drivers are useless, you can't even browse firefox or let alone play any actual games. What is the point of having open source drivers if they don't even work? Nvidia's GPUs have had day one support, and unlike AMD, "support" actually means the GPU works for something that is meaningful.

I wouldn't really call what is happening here "support". Really feels like us Linux users were thrown to the side with little consideration.

Been following this thread for a while now. Can't believe this has been known for 3 months, without a fix released.

Just a moment ago a random freeze occurred running Firefox and other applications, no games. Spotify kept playing in the background. Cursor not moving and unable to open another shell.

Last edited by Pangaea on 16 Nov 2019 at 1:25 am UTC

Quoting: GuestWhere is this thread? I have the exact same issue with older hardware that your last qoute described. CPU or GPU hang the system sometime at low loads.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111481

Quoting: GuestWhere is this thread? I have the exact same issue with older hardware that your last qoute described. CPU or GPU hang the system sometime at low loads.

I had this problem with my Polaris GPU, but it only happened during video playback, and I fixed it by disabling hardware video decoding. This was quite a while ago though, so I just turned it all back on to see if the problem persists.

(In case you use mpv, add hwdec=off to your ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf. In Kodi you'll find it in Settings->System->Video in Expert mode. Firefox: media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled in about:config.)

Quoting: PangaeaOtherwise their sales on Black Friday and towards Xmas would probably be impacted more.

Most people who buy Navi gpus don't care about what kind of drivers it has for linux, 90% of the world runs on Windows so less linux buyers wouldn't impact their sales very much.

What's going on with this now? The [bugzilla report](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111481) has been closed/moved and marked as resolved for some reason. The [new gitlab report](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/issues/892) has nobody assigned to it yet, and no more comments. Does AMD still not care about this serious issue?

Black Friday is just around the corner and a couple of months back I had the intention of buying a new computer. But there isn't exactly much point forking out maybe ~1500 EUR/USD/equivalent for a shining new computer that doesn't work. Have to say I'm very disappointed in AMD over this issue :(

It was moved because all Mesa and amdgpu bugs are moving from Bugzilla to Gitlab instance.

For the most part, the situation is good now (only some minor annoyances remain, nothing breaking). Random desktop hangs are gone.

One important patch is still pending to land upstream and I hope it will get into 5.4.1: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/341008/

In a few weeks, Mesa 19.3 with llvm10 should come out, which will make things very stable out of the box. So I'd say you can already get a Navi card for gaming while it's now on sale.

Last edited by Shmerl on 27 Nov 2019 at 5:43 pm UTC

That sounds more promising at least, though it seems from this thread and the bugzilla report that much still remained unstable, unless something has changed in the last week?

Unfortunately none of the hardware I looked at is on sale, but I'll see on Friday what happens then, and decide whether I buy or not. Leaning towards no, but we shall see. At this point I may as well wait until the next AMD card comes out. Although if that one too takes 6-9 months to become stable, it's kinda pointless :-/

Not one of the pieces of hardware I was interested in is part of the Black Friday/Week sales, so I'm postponing a new computer. Hopefully these driver issues will be properly sorted by the time I have another look.

Stay very far away from Navi people. I updated my kernel to 5.4.1 hoping to find some stability, and I'm still getting frequent hangs at random while working on the desktop with various programs, for something related to powerplay:

[ 7642.362475] amdgpu: [powerplay] Failed to export SMU metrics table!
[ 7644.599482] amdgpu: [powerplay] failed send message: SetDriverDramAddrHigh (14)  param: 0x00000080 response 0xffffffc2

I'm browsing Amazon for some Nvidia deal right now, hopefully I'll be able to dump this pos 5700XT to some of my Windows friends...

That bug is easy to avoid - don't use sensors in parallel. I've been waiting for AMD to fix that though. It got better - no more hangs, but this message was still spamming dmesg.

And don't be dramatic about it. Nvidia is from far from perfect either. You simply exchange it to different type of issues.

Last edited by Shmerl on 29 Nov 2019 at 5:13 pm UTC

I'm a bit frustrated, I just want to use my system, that's all. My system hangs, it's not usable, I'm constantly risking to lose my work because everything just stops responding.
In more than 10 years of Nvidia cards on Linux I have encoutered many bugs and glitches but never something so serious.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll try to disable every possible sensors related program and see what happens. Even though someone says it might be related to multi-monitor setups.

I've seen some patches for powerplay locking, but somehow they didn't make it to 5.4? I'll be trying 5.5-rc1 soon anyway, since looks like flip patch which is quite important, didn't make into 5.4 either.