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Title: [Rant]: RX 5700... a frustrating experience
Page: 6/11
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sub 11 Jan 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](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opencl-amd/) despite it having no maintainer apparently.
OMG. That disappointing, tbh.
sub 11 Jan 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 12 Jan 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 Jan 2020 at 9:08 pm UTC
Tuxee 12 Jan 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 12 Jan 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 Jan 2020 at 9:27 pm UTC
Tuxee 12 Jan 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 12 Jan 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 12 Jan 2020
User Avatar
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?
Tuxee 12 Jan 2020
Hm. I could give the Kisak PPA a try with my 19.10 on the secondary drive... lm-sensors on my 18.04 doesn't do any harm either. Maybe it wasn't lm-sensors at all but some completely different. That's what I meant above with the "instabilty".
Plintslîcho 18 Jan 2020
For those owning a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5700 card, does it have zero fan function?
If so, does it work out of the box with the amdgpu driver?

Prices for the RX 5700 are dropping at the moment, which makes it tempting to get one.
Pangaea 18 Jan 2020
Quoting: PlintslîchoPrices for the RX 5700 are dropping at the moment, which makes it tempting to get one.
Cheers for that info. Had my eyes on the Nitro card, and it hasn't decreased in price (probably a little up tbh), but I see the 'normal' Sapphire XT is down a little bit.

Still concerned about the driver issues, though, since I'm not on a bleeding edge stuff. From what I can tell (I'm on Mint 19.2 still), I don't have access to 5.5 yet (nor 5.4), so would have to rely on the 5.3 kernel.

Keep hoping for an actual sale, but doesn't look like any stores here are interested in that. :(

As an aside, when are the new Nvidia cards out? Maybe that will push the AMD price down a bit more?
sub 18 Jan 2020
My experience so far with the 5700 XT.

Not a single problem on stock Arch and Windows 10.
Performance is stellar (okay, I'm coming from a HD 7950).
I can drive anything in 1440p with maximum details so far and still have high stable framerates.

Using still my 11 years old be-quite 550 W power supply (paired with a Ryzen 7 3700X).
Plintslîcho 18 Jan 2020
Quoting: PangaeaCheers for that info. Had my eyes on the Nitro card, and it hasn't decreased in price (probably a little up tbh), but I see the 'normal' Sapphire XT is down a little bit.

[...]

As an aside, when are the new Nvidia cards out? Maybe that will push the AMD price down a bit more?
Yeah, the prices haven't come down by a wide margin. The cards still cost more than 300 EUR/USD where I live. But the aforementioned Sapphire card has come down by 10 to 20 EUR and the MSI Radeon RX 5700 MECH GP OC currently costs only a little more than 300 EUR, which is why I'm looking a little closer now at these cards again.

Unfortunately, my preferred model, the PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 Red Dragon, has become more expensive at the same time.

Don't know what's up next at camp nVidia. But apparently nVidia has dropped the price for their RTX 2060 card to bring it closer to AMD's new 5600 cards and maybe that will have an effect on the current AMD lineup as well.

Quoting: sub[...] Using still my 11 years old be-quite 550 W power supply (paired with a Ryzen 7 3700X).
Thanks for the info, that's good to read. It's exactly the same setup that I'm currently running.

Anyway, I'm not really in need of a new GPU and frankly, getting one would only mean burning money. My RX 570 still gets all the things done that I throw at it (at high or ultra settings at full HD). But as I said, the RX 5700 is tempting at the current price level.
tuubi 18 Jan 2020
User Avatar
Quoting: PlintslîchoFor those owning a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5700 card, does it have zero fan function?
If so, does it work out of the box with the amdgpu driver?
Yes, and it does work out of the box. My GPU fans are not spinning right now. I've got the XT, but I think it works the same on the non-XT.
Plintslîcho 18 Jan 2020
Thanks tuubi.
Shmerl 18 Jan 2020
Quoting: PlintslîchoFor those owning a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5700 card, does it have zero fan function?
If so, does it work out of the box with the amdgpu driver?

Prices for the RX 5700 are dropping at the moment, which makes it tempting to get one.
Yes, it does. It often stops fans for me under low load. GPU temperature at that point can be around 50°C. When it goes above, fans turn back on.

You can also define your own fan curves with [radeon-profile](https://github.com/marazmista/radeon-profile) if you want.

Last edited by Shmerl on 18 Jan 2020 at 11:46 pm UTC
Tuxee 19 Jan 2020
Quoting: PlintslîchoFor those owning a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5700 card, does it have zero fan function?
If so, does it work out of the box with the amdgpu driver?

Prices for the RX 5700 are dropping at the moment, which makes it tempting to get one.
When working on the desktop my Sapphire's Pulse RX 5700 fans don't turn.
Shmerl 27 Jan 2020
If anyone in EU is looking for Navi cards on sale, see:
https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/8GB-Sapphire-Radeon-RX-5700-XT-Pulse-8G-GDDR6-HDMI-TRIPLE-DP-OC-W--BP--_1324347.html

Last edited by Shmerl on 27 Jan 2020 at 1:23 am UTC
sub 27 Jan 2020
Quoting: ShmerlIf anyone in EU is looking for Navi cards on sale, see:
https://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/8GB-Sapphire-Radeon-RX-5700-XT-Pulse-8G-GDDR6-HDMI-TRIPLE-DP-OC-W--BP--_1324347.html
I bought exactly that card from exactly that shop and I'm more than happy with it.
No issues so far. Arch, Kernel 5.4.

As you said there are important Navi fixes in 5.5, what improvements are (apart from overclocking support) to expected from the 5.5 kernel release?
Plintslîcho 27 Jan 2020
The price for the XT version might have come down a bit lately. But for the ordinary 5700 version it has just increased noticeable again, probably because it was too close to that of the just released 5600 cards.
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