linux4noobs @programming.dev KokusnussRitter @discuss.tchncs.de 9h ago

Help needed setting up AMD GPU

Recently bought a RX7600XT and experienced lagging in Krita and flickering in blender since. I installed the drivers from AMD's website, and ROCm.

I am unsure and totally overwhelmed as to what could cause these issues. ~~ChatGPT always wants me to edit /etc/default/grub, but I am not sure why and what the bootloader has got to do with it?~~

These are quite a lot of questions and few information. If you need anything I am more than happy to provide any information.

Sys Info

Linux Mint Cinnamon 22
Linux Kernel 6.8
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
GPU AMD Navi 33 Radeon 7600 XT
RAM 16GB @3600mHz | 36GB Swap

10 comments

You should not ask chatgpt for these things, you should look for documentation and forums. A good place to understand how things work is the arch wiki, even if you don't use arch, most of the stuff is valid for other distros... except instructions on installing packages, that you should look in your distro's specific documentation and forums.
- If you read the documentation you would know that:
  
  Drivers have a part in the kernel and some others outside the kernel
  
  The part inside the kernel is called amdgpu most likely already installed and you don't need to do anything
  
  For the parts outside you can use either amd's (the ones you tried to install) or the community made ones (mesa)
  
  Amd's own stuff is better only in raytracing and worse in everything else, so unless you are doing raytracing you should avoid it and use mesa
  
  Mesa is likely already installed and you could have just done nothing, if not look up how to install that
  
  If you still want amd's own stuff, or if you want rocm, you should look that up on mint documentation and forum
  
  Footnote: it is possible to install both mesa and amd's software, and set up some games to use one and some and everything else to use the other, this allows you to always use mesa, except for those games with raytracing, but seeing that you are already overwhelmed I would avoid that for now, and maybe try if when you are more experienced.
Since no one mentioned these obvious mistakes yet: is your monitor cable plugged into your 7600XT, and not into the mainboard? Did you check your discrete and integrated GPU usages to make sure the programs are using the correct one?
I installed the drivers from AMD’s website, and ROCm.

Doesn't Linux itself already have the AMD drivers that you need, so that you didn't have to install any additional drivers?
- Yes, I did it because blender didn't find the GPU. It didn't fix it, installing ROCm did, but I didn't uninstall them
  
  Maybe this will help?
Which Linux distribution do you use?
- Sorry, forgot to mention and edited the post. Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon
AMD drivers are baked into the kernel, so you shouldn’t have to install anything specific for your card. Steps I’d take:

uninstall whatever you didn’t install using your package manager

check that mesa and rocm are installed through your package manager

With Linux distros, you install almost everything through a package manager. Downloading an installer from some website does happen very occasionally, but 99% of the time it will be provided by your distro.
I installed the drivers from AMD's website, and ROCm.

~~What distro?~~

Teachable Momment Time:

Installing drivers from websites blindly isn't great on consumer desktop Linux.

Those sites are really meant for production/server/workstations.

Nvidia drivers as an example, use the distro package manager instead.

Some distros even have separate ISO images entirely.

Or different/extra setup instructions/steps for Nvidia users entirely.

No need to install extra shit for AMD.

RHEL, Ubuntu and SLED are also technically the only supported distros for AMD Radeon™ Linux® Drivers / GPUPRO.

Driver's are baked into Kernel+Mesa.

some distros.....

Tho some distros lag behind on Kernel+Mesa releases....like buntu....probably need to add some PPA just to get recent versions lol.

Consider using a container for Blender instead:

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Distrobox

Such as using a Fedora Distrobox:

distrobox create --name fedora --image ghcr.io/ublue-os/fedora-distrobox:latest

Then sudo dnf install blender rocm

inside the box.

You can easily export applications from your containers with BoxBuddy.

Tinkering with drivers on a host computer makes things worse oftentimes. Mucking up containers is much easier to fix.

Reasons why DacinchiBox uses rusticl instead of ROCm.

You could be doing all this with just a ujust command on Bazzite. 🙃

10 comments