Do I need to manually install AMD GPU driver updates on Ubuntu 20.04?

Question

I am fairly new to Ubuntu. Do driver updates for an AMD GPU occur automatically with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade? Or do I have to manually install them from the AMD website? After running the command: sudo lshw -c video, this is what pops up in my terminal:

       description: Display controller
       product: Lexa [Radeon 540X/550X/630 / RX 640 / E9171 MCM]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       version: c0
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0
       resources: irq:149 memory:a0000000-afffffff memory:b0000000-b01fffff ioport:3000(size=256) memory:d1300000-d133ffff memory:d1340000-d135ffff

Thank you :)

Answer 1

They'll be updated by sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade, yes. You don't need to do anything else. They're actually part of the kernel (and therefore come shipped with every Linux distro), but apt handles new kernel releases nicely, so there's basically nothing extra to do. The only time you'll want to download them from the AMD website is if you need the Pro version for some reason, which is basically only if you want to use your card for OpenCL computing.

The other thing to bear in mind is the default Ubuntu kernel is often slightly behind the actual vanilla kernel, because Canonical adds a bunch of stuff that they need time to develop and test. If you ever have issues with graphics, it's worth installing the latest kernel to get the newest amdgpu drivers, just to see if that fixes things for you.