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all AMD-PC do I need the proprietary drivers (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Should I use the proprietary drivers? How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers? I use ChimeraOS (Arch Linux)

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No. The open source drivers are better at almost everything. The only reasons to use the propriatary one is if you need some OpenCL improvements of if you are using a Radeon Pro GPU. For normal usage and gaming the open source driver will offer more performance and better compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I wish Nvidia was the same story

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

if you need some OpenCL improvements

As far as I can tell mesa and the proprietary drivers both use the ROCm packages for OpenCL. I don't think there's actually a difference on that front.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Mesa has its own OpenCL implementations for AMD GPUs too: Clover and RustiCL. However, Clover is not really developed any more (afaik) and lacks some important extensions, such that many programs can't use it. RustiCL is rather new, and I don't know how well it works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I honestly don't realy know. The Arch wiki says that there are some differences with AMF and OpenCL but I don't know how up to date that information is.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah I had to double check as well. It actually does elaborate.

"AMDGPU PRO OpenCL - used because Mesa OpenCL is not fully complete. Proprietary component only for Polaris GPUs. The onward GPUs use the open ROCm OpenCL."

So for anything newer than the RX 500 series (anything after 2017) it doesn't matter for OpenCL it seems.

From what I can gather the OpenCL stack used to be proprietary, but they decided to open source it when ROCm came along. So the Pro driver used to be more important and now it's really only necessary for AMF since the Vulkan and OpenGL portions are straight up worse than mesa.