AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare

Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by Shekelphile on Sunday July 02, 2023 @05:44PM (#36566117)

I'm not even sure why people have this myth that AMD's GPU support is good on linux. Having an upstreamed driver doesn't mean much when it's just as buggy and unstable as the closed drivers were 10-15 years ago. Everyone I know using a modern AMD GPU on Linux evangelize the fuck out of them while simultaneously complaining about constant black screens/hard freezes/poor performance in games/etc. I've never experienced such issues with nvidia and besides the annoyance of having to make sure you have the proprietary blob installed there's no real issues.

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Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by minimaul on Sunday July 02, 2023 @05:54PM (#36566193)

I genuinely don’t recognise what you’re describing - for context I have a AMD APU system (5750GE - zen 3 and vega GPU cores), and a steam deck. I’ve had the APU for over a year now. I also have a desktop with a NVIDIA 3090.

All three are stable for general desktop use on Arch Linux (so up to date kernels etc). The NVIDIA set up has massive compute advantages (CUDA), but for desktop use if anything I have fewer issues on AMD - especially relating around desktop tearing and video which is where I have the most pain with NVIDIA.

Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

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Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by Shekelphile on Sunday July 02, 2023 @05:58PM (#36566235)

My experience is that universally my linux gamer friends who own AMD products have worse experiences than I do - they are absolutely usable, but not worth buying at all if your primary purpose for owning a GPU is gaming.

> Black screens & hard freezes are nonexistent. Gaming performance on the Steam Deck and APU is reasonable for the hardware. Proton works better for me with AMD than NVIDIA (which makes sense, after all Valve’s development of it is aimed at the steam deck primarily).

Most likely you are playing games that Valve has already deployed patches/hacks for. Go off the beaten path from Steam and the proton runtime and you will find quickly that AMD is severely buggy.

Black screening is especially common with vega dgpus, can't say if it extends to the igpus are not but if you google 'vega black screen bug linux' you will find hundreds of reddit posts and bug reports about this going back to 2018.

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Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by minimaul on Sunday July 02, 2023 @06:14PM (#36566353)

I’m playing quite a wide variety of titles - from recent AAA on the Steam Deck to really old titles that have never even been on Steam. Plus emulators for all sorts of systems - from really old up to things like GameCube/Wii or even Switch.

I can’t speak to discrete cards, but it’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m curious as to if your friends are using distros with older Mesa/kernels? That might explain some of the disparity.

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Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by anonbanker on Monday July 03, 2023 @05:09PM (#36578865)

That bug was fixed over a year and a half ago.

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Re:AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare by agentgumshoe on Sunday July 02, 2023 @09:30PM (#36567655)

Because it's not a myth for everyone?

I think issues exist on both sides, you're just picking examples that work for your argument

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