I just got hold of an AMD RX7800 XT to replace my current Nvidia RTX3080.
I’m likely overthinking this but from what I understand I should just be able to swap the cards then uninstall the Nvidia drivers correct?
I’m running EndeavourOS which I installed with the option to include the Nvidia drivers by default so dunno if that changes anything? I’ve been daily driving Linux for exactly a year as of this month but I still kinda feel like a newbie sometimes lmao. Thanks in advance!
(Update) I got my AMD card installed and loaded up Wayland with no issues, only thing I had to install was the AMD Vulkan drivers for Steam.
There isn’t anything you need to know. It’s the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it’s like, a job or hobby or something.
Meh… there are certain use cases where the selection between mesa or either of the AMD drivers does matter.
Short answer is that you don’t have to do anything.
Slightly longer answer is that you can remove all existing nvidia packages, with any boot parameters they may have required, call it a day.
Yep. When I switched out my Nvidia for AMD it was as plug-and-play as it gets.
I’ve never done the process myself, but I would probably uninstall the nvidia drivers while the system is still running, install whatever amd packages you need I know there are some vulkan packages that people need that aren’t installed by default, and then power off and swap the cards.
You just got me to remember something about a Vulkan package when I first installed Steam so gonna find the AMD package for that. Thanks!
You shouldn’t need to install anything for the amd gpu
I’m not familiar with these vulkan packages, what should I look for?
I don’t have an AMD card, so I don’t know, but I recall reading on the endeavourOS forums of people solving their AMD gaming issues by installing the proper vulkan packages. That is to say. You should head to the endeavourOS forums and peruse around there. You will probably find that information very quickly there.
Thanks! I’ve not been having many problems, but if it’s causing a performance loss it would be good to take care of it, I’ll check that out
Even if you install the drivers while the system is running, it is not recommended to remove the card while the system is running.
I never suggested that they remove the card while the system is running. You must have skipped the part in my comment that says
power off and swap the cardsDon’t worry I wasn’t planning on sticking my hands into a powered up PC anyway haha.
I think the only thing to keep in mind is that Nvidias proprietary drivers work better for Linux whereas for AMD it is the open-source ones.
I have an Nvidia card and the prop. drivers have worked flawlessly for me for years.
I know the open source drivers are closing the gap for Nvidia, and they also seem to be playing ball on that front. But for AMD the open source drivers are definitely the way to go from what I understand.
If no one minds my hyjacking part of this thread.
Id also like some similar advice.
I use blender. Not heavily but have been playing on it for 20plus years.
My GPU is pretty old. 1050ti at the time nvidia was pretty much it for blender.
Im looking for a sub £300 card in the next 3 to 6 months.
Is AMD well supported by blender now. And what cards would folks recomend these days.
PS not a gamer. 0ad is about as close as i get.
Take a look at
From what I can tell NVIDIA still is much better for Blender at least points-wise. No idea if you’d notice it on normal usage …
Is there a particular reason for ditching the 3080? I have the laptop 16 GB Ti version and have thought about getting the desktop version to do split AI loads.
Too many driver issues, couldn’t get Wayland working despite new drivers supposedly working with it.
Sorry to hear. I don’t have any issues with mine and Fedora, but I’ve not messed with anything advanced in the user space drivers for games. I’ve thought about trying some feature title gaming here or there, but I am not willing to buy into a whole ecosystem of gaming or play anything that I am unable to own. As far as the kernel space driver, I have not had any issues. Fedora regularly updates the kernel and builds the Nvidia driver from source in the background with every update. It evolved a bit in how they were doing the hook and build from source. It went through a phase where it took a few minutes to build before shutting down each time there was a kernel update, but now it takes less than 30 seconds.
I still don’t like how nvcc (the cuda code compiler add-on for GCC) is proprietary, and that has some side effects when it comes to compiling other projects in general. However I have the version of nvcc that some projects use through pip/Python. It is the same nvcc and required files, but it doesn’t require the entire dev toolkit, legalise monstrosity, or bloat of the package download directly from Nvidia.
With Fedora, I run Gnome/Wayland in F40 WS as far as I am aware. My laptop doesn’t have a convenient mux to use the integrated Intel graphics for the monitor separate from the 3080Ti GPU, so it is running my monitor as well. Anyways, may be there is something I’m that mix that can be an issue but isn’t one for me. That’s why all the bla bla bla, maybe your issue is outside of this. For me, I have no issues whatsoever. Like I was pretty worried initially about a laptop version of the 3080 having so many extra thermal interrupts and the potential for failures, but I’ve had nothing to complain about with daily use for over a year and some pretty heavy AI workloads. Fedora is pretty dialed, especially with the Anaconda system outside of the kernel that does the source driver build and key shim. It does all of this with a single NVME that has a Windows partition and secure boot enabled.
