Hi all,
I’ve been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It’s been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600XT used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I’ll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you
The needed drivers should be provided by the kernel, so no.
You won’t need any additional driver, since, as you already said, it is already included in the kernel.
However, as owner of a RX6600, I can tell you that the GPU will be quite loud sometimes. I can recommend you to check out
LACT
, which let’s you define fan curves, which makes it A LOT less noisy.Appreciate it. Is there a gui for LACT? (I worry so much that I’d mess things up when it’s a config file). Would you be able to share your configs?
I have RX 7600 on EndeavourOS. The installation is 2 years old or so, so I don’t remember everything. Normally for gaming you don’t need any extra packages, because Mesa (which contains the Open Source AMD GPU drivers) is in the Kernel. Usually that’s all you need for gaming. However I do have installed some vulkan related packages. The package info says this is required by
steam
, so you might have it already.yay -Qi vulkan-radeon
to see your information about the current installed package (which tells me what installed package requires it) or lookup from repository withyay -Si vulkan-radeon
. You can read more here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPUThank you. I think I already have that installed.
The open source kernel drivers will work. If you want to bother installing their proprietary drivers, I’d recommend reading the Arch Wiki, but you may need to do some things differently even though EndeavorOS is Arch-based.
From the wiki: “Most users do not need these proprietary drivers.”
Typically, no. AMD (and Intel) are generally plug and play with the same OS install. Drivers are open source and provided via Kernel and Mesa packages.
I do not use EndeavorOS so I cannot confirm if any additional packages are needed for Vulkan support. However, that wouldn’t change if you’re just upgrading from one AMD GPU to another.
Thank you.
Most people will tell you there is no difference between AMDVLK drivers and RADV but clearly there is since RADV is what Valve uses for the Steam Deck. Heres a great video comparing the three options AMD has for linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAIzRlhvijU
I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers. Do not use AMDGPU-PRO ever though.
I think RADV is what I’m using. I’ll have to double check, as it’s been a long time since messing with the drivers.