Should I use the proprietary drivers? How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers? I use ChimeraOS (Arch Linux)
No. The open source drivers are better at almost everything. The only reasons to use the propriatary one is if you need some OpenCL improvements of if you are using a Radeon Pro GPU. For normal usage and gaming the open source driver will offer more performance and better compatibility.
if you need some OpenCL improvements
As far as I can tell mesa and the proprietary drivers both use the ROCm packages for OpenCL. I don’t think there’s actually a difference on that front.
I honestly don’t realy know. The Arch wiki says that there are some differences with AMF and OpenCL but I don’t know how up to date that information is.
Yeah I had to double check as well. It actually does elaborate.
“AMDGPU PRO OpenCL - used because Mesa OpenCL is not fully complete. Proprietary component only for Polaris GPUs. The onward GPUs use the open ROCm OpenCL.”
So for anything newer than the RX 500 series (anything after 2017) it doesn’t matter for OpenCL it seems.
From what I can gather the OpenCL stack used to be proprietary, but they decided to open source it when ROCm came along. So the Pro driver used to be more important and now it’s really only necessary for AMF since the Vulkan and OpenGL portions are straight up worse than mesa.
Mesa has its own OpenCL implementations for AMD GPUs too: Clover and RustiCL. However, Clover is not really developed any more (afaik) and lacks some important extensions, such that many programs can’t use it. RustiCL is rather new, and I don’t know how well it works.
Don’t use proprietary drivers and don’t install amdvlk or whatever it’s called, just use mesa if the Steam install asks you to choose.
The open source drivers for AMD have great performance, they power the Steam Deck and have great compatibility.
and more tested too
Unless you have need of a special feature the proprietary driver adds (which are unrelated to gaming and most everyday stuff), the open source driver is better in every way gets higher performance in gaming and better stability, and is the reason AMD is notorious for running well on Linux in most cases.
Unlike the NVIDIA driver, the AMD proprietary driver on Linux is intended for special usecases.
As far as I know, the open source drivers are recommended for AMD - my driver installer in Mint doesn’t even list proprietary drivers.
Tangential: do you need proprietary drivers for ROCm?
Nope rocm works great with open source drivers and is way better than it was 6 months to a year ago
No, I think I have the library rocm smi lib (or something like that) (on Endeavour/Arch btw) installed and it is used by
btopto display GPU stats. EDIT: The Arch package isextra/rocm-smi-lib
Usually not.
How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers?
None.
Isn’t there an fps limitation on HDMI using the open source GPU drivers? Something about hdcp/hdmi2.1?
