Amd next horizon event: Last week

Note: This is not a NVIDIA v.s. AMD Post

In the past I have said many times that NVIDIA had better performance on GNU/Linux due to poor drivers from AMD. However in recent times the open source AMD drivers have gotten better by leaps and bounds. Their efforts has continued to move in the right direction, just not as fast as many would hope. Mesa has made many improvements to OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 2018. There has also been improvements by Valve and other companies to make these opensource drivers better for GNU/Linux gaming. As of June 2019 both NVIDIA and AMD work rather well on Windows but on Linux, it’s definitely easier to set up AMD cards. If you want your graphics driver to be in the mainline kernel and work without proprietary kernel modules...you have to go AMD.

Note: Mesa implements various API’s (Application programming interface) like OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenMAX, VDPAU, VA API, XvMC and Vulkan.

AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series

AMD announced its new Radeon GPUs at E3 last week. The new "Navi" Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT is in competition with RTX 2060 and 2070. The Radeon RX 5700XT will be available for $449, while the RX 5700 is a $379 GPU. A $500 50th Anniversary of the card will also be available. As for the mainline kernel support for the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT won't all be there for launch day in July. It will be around September before we see  stable/released versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for launch-day but the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver support who knows. AMD's "Navi" GPU support is likely to come with Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2. which should shipped with Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora 31.

Proton 4.2-6

Valve's just released Proton 4.2-6. If you are a gamer I don't need to tell you have important Proton is. Proton 4.2-6 remains based on upstream Wine 4.2. They also say that DXVK 1.2.1 has been rebuilt with a modern compiler. The aim is to increase performance for 32-bit games.

Note: Valve's Proton 4.2-7 Fixes Performance & Sound Regressions

Regardless of what happens between AMD and NVIDIA in the PC graphics card wars, AMD GPUs will be a treat if you are an open-source driver fan. The open source driver is part of the kernel, meaning less steps to get up and running with Steam and Steam Proton. Just plug and play.