I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it’s about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it’s 982 mods that I can’t be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it’s the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you’re wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.
I’m not using an immutable distro and the issues with the Vulkan drivers have nothing to do with them.
Explain in detail then…
I’m not who you were replying to, and I’m by no means a beginner… but I just got the Framework Desktop with the AMD Strix Halo APU and I initially installed Fedora and could not get games to run through Steam. I eventually installed Nobara, and overall I don’t like it, but it played every game I tried without any fuss.
It ranges from significant performance differences between the drivers with specific games to games having rendering issues with specific drivers. A lot of games don’t work at all with the proprietary driver.
My most recent issue was with the Indiana Jones game having horrible traversal stuttering making some areas basically unplayable on RADV, but AMDVLK had no stuttering and better framerate overall.
I think the experience you were lead on to was the open source driver built into the kernel.
With that the moving parts are the kernel, and the amd-gpu-firmware. The open source setup is much more reliable, and if a bug ever arises, it tends to get fixed quickly. You update, and it’s gone.
Using the proprietary driver is difficult with regardless of vendor.
That’s interesting, I don’t remember which implementation I’m actually using, possibly RADV, but don’t remember having any issues, unfortunately I don’t have Indiana Jones to try to independently confirm that the driver is indeed causing a problem there. Have you seen issues in other games?
RADV has the least issues but I still tend to test AMDVLK (vulkan-headers makes switching drivers per-game easy) for any big performance differences, and it’s typically the first thing I try for crashes now. If you want to use ray tracing at all you should definitely use AMDVLK, it performs way better.