I'm on a Ubuntu 16.04 based system using xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu However using apt I see that there is a package: xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu-hwe-16.04 available. What is the difference? Could I see any performance gains by installing this package or even installing a PPA with updated mesa? I'm using a laptop with a FX-9800P APU. I'd like to use OBS on this system,but I'm definitely seeing limitations.
Asked
Active
Viewed 3,183 times
1 Answers
0
HWE stands for Hardware Enablement and more info about it can be found at this answer. In a nutshell, the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu-hwe-16.04 package is intended to provide you with an updated driver for AMD GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that were released after the release of your Ubuntu operating system. The idea here is to provide Ubuntu the driver support necessary for hardware devices (in this case: AMD's graphics devices) that were released after your Ubuntu system was released.
It's interesting to take a look at the pages of the packages xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu-hwe-16.04 (1.3.0-0ubuntu1~16.04.1) and xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu (1.1.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1) so you can see which are their package dependencies. Each of these pages also contain a table of architectures (amd64, arm64, i386 et cetera), so if you pick one architecture and click on list of files you'll be able to see the contents of such package.
Lastly, because the HWE package is solely intented to provide you up-to-date hardware driver support, by installing such package you're most likely not going to see any performance gain on the graphics processing.
Yuri Sucupira
- 994