"Basically my OS comes with Mesa 13"
I would suggest installing a newer system for a simple reason: updated software and system components. You might swap the kernel and other parts as you see fit on an old OS, but you never know when you break something you wouldn't want.
Aside from that, it should be okay. Although you didn't tell us which card you will get.

Quoting: tuxintuxedo"Basically my OS comes with Mesa 13"
I would suggest installing a newer system for a simple reason: updated software and system components. You might swap the kernel and other parts as you see fit on an old OS, but you never know when you break something you wouldn't want.
Aside from that, it should be okay. Although you didn't tell us which card you will get.

Updating the OS is the last thing I'd like to do, technically it's on a Debian 9 base but heavily modified with many modern packages.

Regarding the GPU (oops) - It's an RX 5500 XT.

Thanks for the input :)

It should work. But according to the Phoronix test in December, it still needs some improvement to catch up to the Windows driver/performance.

As a basic Linux user (that just wants things to work with the best possible performance) my recommendation is Kernel 5.3.18 and any recent MESA version. The 5.4+ Kernels have been practically unusable for me because of various issues. I always use ACO as default instead of LLVM, very rarely encounter any problems with it.

(I'm on RX 5700 btw, the "rare" ITX one :P)

You need latest Mesa and very recent kernel for the RX 5500XT.

For Navi, I recommend kernel 5.6 and Mesa 20 at least.

Last edited by Shmerl on 3 Mar 2020 at 3:23 am UTC

Thank you so much for your help everyone, I think I got everything ready. Ordered the card today and by the time it arrives, Kernel 5.6 should reach rc6 status.

This is the model I got (it even has a backplate!):



-----------------
Just finished cleaning up the host system from the closed source Nvidia driver in preparation for the new card. Decided to have some fun (and a final look) with Nouveau and the good old GTX 960:



Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 5 Mar 2020 at 9:35 pm UTC

I am pleased to announce that I've received my card 5 days ago. The preparations I had made to my system were almost on spot, the last and only issue I had was booting the desktop and I've literally spent the past 3 days recompiling the Kernel, building deb packages and skimming through logs to root out the problem.

At one point I was ready to give up, but I went back to the drawing board and reconnected the dots.

This is the end result :) :


GPU itself and Packaging:



Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 16 Mar 2020 at 11:53 pm UTC

Congrats! Were you bitten with having an older kernel or Mesa than was needed to bring up the desktop?

Last edited by Shmerl on 17 Mar 2020 at 12:11 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlCongrats! Were you bitten with having an older kernel or Mesa than was needed to bring up the desktop?

The Kernel was in very good shape, I had to enable some non-navi related tweaks to accomodate the system but not related to the desktop issue. The issue was within Mesa, for the moment I didn't create any packages and simply overwritten the libraries over the old ones. It solved the issue but it's not pretty. Later I will build some proper packages to have better file control.

This was a huge learning experience for me. Got no regrets with all the trouble I've had :wink:

Quoting: The_AquabatHI @Avehicle7887 can you run The [unigine Superposition benchmark](https://benchmark.unigine.com/) please? really interested in the results. thanks.

Currently applying a few final tweaks to the system then I will start the benchmarks, got any setting preferences in mind for that test? :)

In other news, ACO is working as expected:



-----
EDIT (Some games in action)

Race Driver GRID (testing 32bit functionality)


Outward (testing aco)


Very happy with the card overall.

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 17 Mar 2020 at 10:11 pm UTC

Unigine isn't a very useful test really. It's not using Vulkan.

I'd use games for that, not synthetic benchmarks. The former are more interesting cases.

Quoting: The_Aquabat@Avehicle7887 Do you own Shadow Of the Tomb Raider?? or Rise of the Tomb Raider? that would be interesting for me also.

are you using a Ryzen 1700X? shouldn't be that much different from my Ryzen 2600 in gaming at least.

I don't own any of the TR games since I don't use Steam (I'm aware these games make a good benchmark).

As for the CPU, I'm using an Intel G4560 with 8GB ram. It's sort of my test bench for experiments and breaking stuff. If you wish I can still try to provide a Basemark/Unigine benchmark. The tests would be based on Mesa 20.0.1 + Kernel 5.5.10 :)

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 18 Mar 2020 at 9:38 pm UTC

A few more screenshots to show what performance you can expect from this card, haven't ran into any issues so far. Witcher 3 got the Mesa 20.0.2 treatment that was released yesterday.

As a reminder, the GPU is sometimes bottlenecked by the Intel G4560 CPU, so your mileage may vary depending on the game.

No Man's Sky (Ultra settings)



Shadow Warrior 2 (Ultra)



Witcher 3 (Ultra - Hairworks Geralt only)



Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 19 Mar 2020 at 1:18 pm UTC

Quoting: The_Aquabat

Quoting: Avehicle7887If you wish I can still try to provide a Basemark/Unigine benchmark. The tests would be based on Mesa 20.0.1 + Kernel 5.5.10 :)

yes please I would like to see the results of a UNigine Superposition Benchmark at 1080p extreme preset.

For some reason I can't get Superposition to run (complains about xcb error in terminal), ironically though the older Heaven benchmark works just fine.

Here's what I got (Ignore the GPU Section, the program doesn't detect it properly but the numbers seem to be correct compared against my RTX 2060S):



PS: Working on that Basemark bench.

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 19 Mar 2020 at 10:53 pm UTC

I moved the GPU to my old gaming rig which runs an i5-4590, since this is slightly faster than the G4560 it was being tested on. I've also decided to run some 3840x1080 tests which you'll find below.

Personal Thoughts (Mini Review):

So after almost 2 weeks with this card, I can say I'm very happy for the price I paid (more on this later). The performance is more or less equal to the older AMD RX 580 and Nvidia GTX 1060, which is what I expected from the start. As far as stability goes, I haven't had any issues (Latest Linux firmware, libdrm 2.4.100, Kernel 5.5.x, Mesa 20.0.x, LLVM 9/10, ACO enabled).

To put this card's performance in perspective with modern competition, it sits right behind the slightly more expensive Nvidia GTX 1660 Super model. Going back to the price, I paid 240 euro to import this from the U.S (Amazon), as it's not available locally - Malta.

If you're looking for a solid 1080p card with Open Source support this is a fine choice, furthermore if you find an RX 580 for a cheaper price and don't care about power consumption, that's an even better choice as performance is roughly the same between the two.

Ok off to the screenshots:

Witcher 3



Shadow Warrior 2



Wolfenstein - The New Order (OpenGL)


Testbench


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 25 Mar 2020 at 11:56 pm UTC

Hm, familiar area. Is it Rannvaig?