I’m running CachyOS, and having an Nvidia card, I’m using their Nvidia-specific kernel. I know this 3060 won’t last forever, and I’m planning to upgrade to an AMD card for a better overall experience.
Is there anything I should be aware of regarding the kernel or other compatibility when switching brands? Can I simply plug in the new one and run pacman -Syu?
Sidenote: I will plan around my PSU’s output, so no need to advise regarding physical compatibility.
I switched from an Nvidia to AMD on catchy. There are instructions in the Wiki. https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/chwd/gpu_migration/
It worked for me with only one issue. When I booted up the first time, I had no signal to the monitor. No big deal, I just used SSH from another computer to install the AMD drivers and update the bootloader.
Can you describe the process of installing AMD drivers in this environment? It should be plug and play, though admittedly this was my experience with EndeavourOS, I’ve not yet tried Cachy
Look to the wiki link in my previous post for details, but the basic procedure was to uninstall the Nvidia drivers, shut down, install the new card, boot up and install the AMD drivers (there is a command to automatically detect your card and select the appropriate driver from the repos), and update the bootloader. I ended up having to do the second half through SSH, but otherwise a pretty painless process.
That’s really peculiar, both the kernel mode and userspace drivers are included by most disteos by default, but I can totally understand the nv proprietary driver making a significant enough change that users will need to address when swapping to Intel or AMD dgfx
That’s what I thought, but bazzite didn’t like the switch from Nvidia to AMD either so idk what’s going on with these distros.
I can offer some distro-agnostic observations . . .
Having swapped from one to the other some time ago on Gentoo, what I had to (re)install was the kernel (since I’d built it without those drivers), mesa, and some xorg-drivers stuff (which may not be relevant to you). Also, LLVM (ugh), because the AMD drivers compile stuff on the fly somehow and gcc doesn’t have a usable AMDGPU backend. Or something like that. At that point, the system should boot well enough to bring up the GUI, and you can worry about vulkan and such after that. If you have an initrd, that may need to be rebuilt or replaced. Bootloader should be fine if it’s the same kernel version.
Having the kernel drivers for AMD present in a system with an nvidia card shouldn’t present any problems—without the hardware, the kernel won’t even try to load them. In theory, you should even be able to have both cards in there at once (if your mobo has the slots) and blacklist the drivers for the card you don’t want to use, but it isn’t the safest thing to try.
Thanks, and that’s what I was thinking might be the case. CachyOS has an easy tool for switching kernels, and I have a vague memory of needing to blacklist certain parameters during boot, but I’ll have to look into that more. Somebody kindly shared a migration guide link elsewhere to look at, and I bet it talks about some of the things you’ve mentioned.
Hopefully I can get away without a reinstall!
I got a 7900xt and I’m very happy with it!
I wish I’d spent $100 more at the time and got the XTX. I just want that little bit extra in some games, where it might make 4k (medium) hit 80fps stable instead of 60fps. Or 2k (high) hit 120fps instead of 100.
I will say, I got an XFX card and man are they long. Deffo check your case!
Thanks! I’ll keep that note about the XTX in mind. I have a 240Hz monitor, but I only play at 1080p, so that might be just the ticket.
I have a 302mm card in my case now, but I think it can accommodate a max of 330mm (with some maneuvering). Gotta keep those things in mind with ITX builds!
If you want to approach 200Hz, then it’s probably still good advice to go for the XTX, especially if high framerate is a strong feel-good improvement for you.
I’ve got a 2k 240Hz monitor, I can drop it to 1080p for testing if you want me to try any specific games out. If I’ve got it, I can give you some rough FPS numbers - just let me know! I’m running steam on Linux with proton, but the numbers should be pretty comparable to Windows these days.
Love an ITX build - I’m cheating with the XTIA XProto L because it’s an open build. I was lucky the 7900XT fit on mine - it’s almost too long. The MERC 310 XFX 7900XT and XTX are both 344mm. It dwarfs my old RTX2070.
They are technically PCIe 4.0 cards. My i7-10700K CPU is only 3.0 capable, but it runs just fine. Some people reported problems using 4.0 cards in 3.0 slots. I haven’t seen issues. I’m told I’m leaving some power on the table, but with the price of RAM, I’m not upgrading any time soon.
One other note, the additional power supply connections required for the GPUs are 2x8 pin connectors for the 7900XT and 3x8 pin connectors for the 7900XTX, so you may need to buy a new power supply or double check your power supply came with enough ports and cables if it’s modular.
If any of your workflows rely on cuda (or any form of gfx compute), you may have a difficult time achieving comparable performance. hopefully rocm is directly packaged for arch + derivs soon, like it is with Fedora, as you’ll be able to use that codepath for OpenCL if they don’t directly offer support for HIP or ROCm.
My typical hangups there would be like, digital film production and other forms of rendering, CAD, physics simulations, and client apps like Folding@home.
Thankfully, I don’t do much GPU computing outside of simple video editing and games. Cuda was never a selling point for me; it was mainly raytracing, and generally speaking, I don’t use it much anymore now that I’ve experienced the wow factor.
This. As far as general 3D work, nope, just install the card and the drivers and off you go.
But if you want to do any compute stuff on the gpu you’re in for a rough time. Like 95% of that software is targeted to Nvidia. There is a bit of work going on to adapt cuda stuff to AMD (rocm and hip like you mentioned), but most developers don’t support it. Last time I tried (about a year ago), I was able to get about a quarter of the software I tried half working.
I game on a 7900xtx on CachyOS and it’s perfectly fine. Cachy will take care of the drivers 100% so it’s just plug and play. Better than my previous 3080ti. No driver issues or whatever. LMK if I can answer any questions
Oh nice, so you swapped from a 3080ti to a 7900XT?
Yep yep
Back in the day, NVIDIA was the most painful to get workin with ole tux and AMD was the better one. Don’t know how it is now, but I think AMD is still decent for linux support
They’re virtually comparable in features, but there’s no denying that the more open nature of AMD naturally leads to fewer pain points. I haven’t had any significant ones (and not ones I know would instead work with AMD), but there could be things that aren’t working well now that I’ve just taken for granted, since I only have the one GPU.
Generally speaking, either GPU should work great for most people for common workloads.
