1w ago

How are RDNA 1 and 2 (AMD RX 5000 & 6000 series) cards on Linux nowadays? EDIT: Apparently they're quite good :)

I read a few posts from a few years ago that they suffered from some sort of ring crash bug frequently.

If you're currently on either of those cards, how is the stability nowadays? Any hiccups or problems, or is it 100% in gaming now?

Bonus question, does the Mesa driver allow you to access the VCN video encoder on the gpu?

EDIT: Thanks for all your responses, everyone! The consensus clearly shows they're pretty balin', and definitely worthy of switching away from Nvidia to. :D

27 comments

not a single issue with my 6700xt. Even Raytracing works, not that I really bother to use it since its such a pointless FPS drain, but thats besides the point.
- I have a 6700xt and can confirm it's just plug and play. No need to mess with those stupid Nvidia drivers, and the performance is pretty great.
  
  yep. Upgrading was super easy too.
  Just pulled out my old one (Which was also an AMD card, just to state it obviously), physically installed the new one, and that was all. No driver shenanigans like on windows.

Never had any issue with my old RX 5700 XT beside hot temperature and so noise, I have mitigated it with changing thermal paste and undervolting it. 0 issue with my RX 6600, so for my RX 7800 XT either

I’ve been using a 5700xt for about 5 years and it’s been great.
What is a ring crash?

6700XT here. Never had any issues. Been using this card for like 2 years on Fedora. Can't comment on the video encoder though.

I haven't had any issues with my RX 6700 XT. It works great for games and CAD. I've never gotten the video encoding working though. I think it needs the proprietary drivers.

My 5700XT has been good to me, but not perfect.
I've had a few crashes to log-in screen early on in Marvel Rivals and on a couple of occasions in AC Valhalla.
I do need to turn off screen space reflections otherwise textures look grainy e.g. roads in Cyberpunk 2077 and guns in one of the Call of Duty games from 3-4 years ago.

I have a 6800XT and not had a single problem, it's been rock solid on Linux and even windows
Not sure about VCN, I do not use it for any video encoding

In normal usage they have no problems. The only issue they have always had, is if you try run them in a virtual machine with GPU passthrough.
They have the dreaded AMD reset bug.

RX6800XT on Debian now has native driver support which works like a charm. Ollama with GPU support works out of the box. So does hashcat. Haven't had time to test any Linux gaming yet.
- I have the same good experience with my 7900xtx. But hashcat dont work with my card. How you got hip running?

6900 XT here smooth like butter.

I had a ROG Zephyrus G14 "AMD Advantage" laptop with a AMD GPU in it that suffered from these "ring" crashes (according to dmesg). They came and went every few months sometimes with several weeks between crashes. When it would happen, audio kept playing but the display was frozen (can't even go to tty) and I had to force poweroff. The crash could also happen on Windows (I installed it just to test repro) but Windows handled restarting the GPU so it wouldn't freeze unlike Linux. The conclusion, at least in the community of people with that laptop, is that it was a hardware defect and the laptop needed to be RMA'd. ASUS wouldn't do anything for mine though despite explaining the issue to them and showing it happening on Windows.
Either way, I now own a Framework 16 with a 7000 series GPU and am very happy :)

RX6800 here, no issues on Arch other than ray-tracing causing crashes on Cyberpunk, sometimes taking the whole system with it, but as soon as I turned it off everything was groovy. 0 issues on other games, although it's been a while since I've put it to any real challenge, as I've been playing Balatro lately.

The only problem i had with my 6950xt was that overclocking was partially broken, but it has already been fixed since kernel 6.7 came out. Other than that i've had no problems.

I had a couple issues with Witcher 3 on my 5700xt. I'm now on a 6900xt and it works great. BTW I use Arch.

6700 XT user here. I'm gaming daily and I have no issues with it, or rather none specific to it's RDNA2 chip.
I can access the H264 and H265 video encoders in OBS via VA-API with no issues and they seem to work fine, as opposed to AMD's Polaris architecture

I know not directly related to the question but I am running a rx9070xt on Fedora Kinoite (immutable) have had absolutely zero issues. As a matter of fact a few games that would not run on my rtx2060 now run without issue.

No issues with my 7800XT.

Never had issues with my 6800 XT. I've rendered videos on GPU via the option often labeled as VAAPI. x264's veryfast mode on CPU is very much enough for screen recording and streaming, though.
I'm using whatever Radeon drivers Fedora and/or Steam happen to ship with.

I have an 5600xt and i used to have crashes quite regularly. Disabling hardware accel in firefox helped. Now i only have crashes when playing games from heroic.
Unfortnately all those crashes turned some friends away from linux

My 6600XT is plug-and-play on Ubuntu. No issues at all.

5700xt. Oh yeah, I used to have that issue. It went away. Haven't had issues for years now. I'm on a rolling-release distro so always the latest kernel/mesa.

RX6650XT running bazzite about a year here. Never had an issue.

I've had my rx6700xt for nearly 3 years now, there were some freezing issues in the beginning which were worked around with some kernel parameter. At some point it got fixed, don't remember when, but now it just works.

RX6650 XT, everything works fine on my Linux desktop (Tumbleweed), my SO had had some issues on Windows with the 6700XT, but they run games in the background almost 24/7, so it could just be a heat issue in the ITX case.

27 comments