Arch Linux

thesidekick

Member

Registered: 2019-12-02

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Help switching from Nvidia to AMD GPU

So I ordered a new AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT for black friday that will probably arrive today or tomorrow. My desktop currently has a Nvidia GTX 970.

How should I go about upgrading the system and avoid borking my Arch installation (which has run flawlessly since I made the switch to linux beginning of 2019).

Should I remove nvidia related packages and install AMD packages prior to swapping the cards, or will I need a USB to chroot after the fact?

UPDATE:
Card arrived shortly after my post.
I cleaned out nvidia packages and removed existing xorg.conf before installing the card. Everything seems to work fine for the most part especially after updating to mesa-git but I hope support gets better in the future as the card underperforms compared to my old 970 in some cases. Also getting screen flicker when using freesync and in fullscreen in some games.

Last edited by thesidekick (2019-12-03 15:36:03)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,645

Re: [SOLVED] Help switching from Nvidia to AMD GPU

With how the current graphics stack is set up, given that you didn't create any custom xorg.config (or via nvidia-xconfig) you don't need to remove anything. However yes you will likely want to remove the nvidia packages and remove any custom configs you've made, given you've done that you can do that at any point, you can even be in the graphical session and delete the nvidia packages, as long as you don't start anything up again that needs to reload e.g. GL libs everything already running at that point will be unaffected (and in general should the graphical interface not come up, you can just boot into a terminal and do relevant maintenance from there)

Last edited by V1del (2019-12-02 11:36:25)

Buddlespit

Member

From: Chesapeake, Va.

Registered: 2014-02-07

Posts: 501

Re: [SOLVED] Help switching from Nvidia to AMD GPU

I have nothing good to say about the 5700 XT. I spent a week reading the navi 10 wiki trying to get it to work on Arch (and Win10). I ended up taking it back to Best Buy and trading it for a 2070S.

I'm sure that the good folks developing Mesa are doing their best, but this card was an error on my system. If the damned thing wasn't overheating, it was throwing errors for powerplay. Any program that checked anything on the card would make my system lag and hiccup. Drove me mad. I had to uninstall lm_sensors and conky.

As for overheating, I had to install radeon-profile (and daemon) to figure out that the card was at 80C and the fans were at 0%. At which point my system lagged and hiccuped because I checked something on the 5700 xt.

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