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My Hardware:
Aorus x399 Motherboard
Threadripper 16 Core
Gigabyte AMD Radeon VII
I need help in interpreting the arch wiki link on installing the AMDGPU drivers for my Radeon VII card. I went to here and determined I need the AMDGPU drivers because my cards architecture is GCN 5. Think I've interpreted everything up to this point correctly.
Reading the installation section here on the AMDGPU I'm confused in how some parts are worded. My questions are as follows.
Question (1):
Do I install all three of these drivers (xf86-video-amdgpu, mesa, vulkan-radeon)? I'm assuming I should install the mesa but how the wiki is worded I get the vibe you either do the xf86-video-amdgpu or the vulkan-radeon but not both. Can someone provide clarification here please and if I'm missing something?
Question (2):
I've never heard of Souther Islands (SI) and Sea Islands (CIK) and honestly don't know wtf that is. Wikipedia says something about SI and CIK being video codec accelerations. Is this relevant to my card and should I be paying any attention to the section 2.1.1 Specify the correct module order and 2.1.2 Set required module parameters? My assumption/understanding is my card uses some other video codec acceleration (what this is I have no idea...) but its not the SI and CIK codec's and therefore these two sections have zero relevance to my card and/or the installation setup concerning my card. Am I wrong here?
Last edited by shanedora (2019-06-13 19:13:07)
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You need all three packages:
mesa
xf86-video-amdgpu
vulkan-radeon
The three packages do the following:
"xf86-video-amdgpu" is an Xorg output driver. You need it if you want to use Xorg.
"mesa" contains the OpenGL driver named "RadeonSI" for AMD hardware. You need it for programs that use OpenGL. You also need it for the Xorg desktop as hardware acceleration of xf86-video-amdgpu is making use of OpenGL.
"vulkan-radeon" contains the Vulkan driver named "RADV" for AMD hardware. You need it for programs that use Vulkan.
Maybe also install some video hardware decoding acceleration stuff through these packages here:
libva-mesa-driver
mesa-vdpau
Do you want to use Steam? Then install the 32-bit version of Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well:
lib32-mesa
lib32-vulkan-radeon
That Southern and Sea Islands stuff is not relevant for you. It's the code names for GPUs from several years ago. For those old cards, the current amdgpu kernel module does not activate by default. Those old cards by default use a different module named "radeon" and have to be forced to use amdgpu. Everything about this does not apply to your "Vega" card, for your card the amdgpu module is the only driver and it will automatically be used by default.
Last edited by Ropid (2019-06-13 19:45:13)
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That explanation was exactly what I needed. You couldn't of done a better job explaining it. Cheers ~S
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That explanation was exactly what I needed. You couldn't of done a better job explaining it. Cheers ~S
I just remembered that there's also an "OpenCL" compute acceleration driver in the following package:
opencl-mesa
For me here on an AMD RX480 card, this "opencl-mesa" package does not work well. Programs that can use OpenCL acceleration will often freeze the whole machine if they make use of this opencl-mesa driver. What instead works well for me here is the AUR package "opencl-amd", which is the OpenCL part extracted out of AMD's proprietary driver package. That makes that "opencl-amd" thing closed-source.
There is also a new OpenCL driver package for AMD named "ROCm", which is open-source. I don't know how that ROCm stuff works. It seems there's AUR packages for it.
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