2018 AMD GPU driver situation

Question

I have been a Ubuntu user for quite some years. I recently bought a second hand r9 290x for some cheap compute power. I am trying to get a clear picture of the current driver situation for amd gpu's. I heard the current (default) opensource AMDGPU driver is excellent but i also see a lot of people trying to install the somewhat proprietary AMDGPU-pro driver. Could any AMD GPU owner share his or her experience/reasons for doing this and note on the stability of this driver? I do need good opencl support and stability preferably on 18.04 (switch back to xorg).

Thanks in advance

Possible duplicate of Ubuntu 14.04.5/16.04 and newer on AMD graphics — dobey, May 20 '18 at 23:18
If you want OpenCL 2.0, you need the amdgpu-pro drivers, still. OpenCL 1.1 should work OK if you install mesa-opencl-icd but depending on what app you want to use with OpenCL, you may need 2.0. — dobey, May 20 '18 at 23:23

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 20 '18 at 22:53

Open-source drivers, called by Mesa stack. Mesa provide lastest OpenGL which your AMD card supports. Mesa 18 provide (afaik) 1.1.60 Vulkan if your card supports. Yes Mesa provide OpenCL for some cards but not so dependable.Check all: https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ It says my card support ROCm while it wont work on my PC.

AMDPRO stack now supports Ubuntu 18.04, so i think you should use proprietary driver. It seems their Vulkan(AMDVLK) yields a little more performance at benchmarks. But i wonder if proprietary driver's OpenCL works.

2018 AMD GPU driver situation

1 Answers1