Linux @lemmy.ml HouseWolf @lemm.ee 3 mo. ago

Swapping out my Nvida card for AMD. Anything I should know about before hand?

I just got hold of an AMD RX7800 XT to replace my current Nvidia RTX3080.

I'm likely overthinking this but from what I understand I should just be able to swap the cards then uninstall the Nvidia drivers correct?

I'm running EndeavourOS which I installed with the option to include the Nvidia drivers by default so dunno if that changes anything? I've been daily driving Linux for exactly a year as of this month but I still kinda feel like a newbie sometimes lmao. Thanks in advance!

(Update) I got my AMD card installed and loaded up Wayland with no issues, only thing I had to install was the AMD Vulkan drivers for Steam.

43 comments

Short answer is that you don't have to do anything.

Slightly longer answer is that you can remove all existing nvidia packages, with any boot parameters they may have required, call it a day.
- Yep. When I switched out my Nvidia for AMD it was as plug-and-play as it gets.
- Also, install the generic or AMD specific packages now. Eg. vulkan-radeon or amdvlk instead of nvidia-utils (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan)
I've never done the process myself, but I would probably uninstall the nvidia drivers while the system is still running, install whatever amd packages you need I know there are some vulkan packages that people need that aren't installed by default, and then power off and swap the cards.
- You just got me to remember something about a Vulkan package when I first installed Steam so gonna find the AMD package for that. Thanks!
  
  You shouldn't need to install anything for the amd gpu
- I'm not familiar with these vulkan packages, what should I look for?
  
  I don't have an AMD card, so I don't know, but I recall reading on the endeavourOS forums of people solving their AMD gaming issues by installing the proper vulkan packages. That is to say. You should head to the endeavourOS forums and peruse around there. You will probably find that information very quickly there.
- Even if you install the drivers while the system is running, it is not recommended to remove the card while the system is running.
  
  I never suggested that they remove the card while the system is running. You must have skipped the part in my comment that says power off and swap the cards
  
  Don't worry I wasn't planning on sticking my hands into a powered up PC anyway haha.
There isn't anything you need to know. It's the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it's like, a job or hobby or something.
- Meh… there are certain use cases where the selection between mesa or either of the AMD drivers does matter.
In case others are interested on the general compute aspect, e.g inference for self hosted AI, here is something related I found :

ZLUDA, for CUDA everywhere, https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/ unfortunately in the process of a major rewrite https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/discussions/261 due to AMD (somehow?!) not wanting their code being used in there (maybe they did some shady RE on NVIDIA work?)

AMD ROCm https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm and HIP https://github.com/ROCm/HIP
I just did this with an RX7900TX and everything worked fine and I decided to install my normal updates. And then my PC wouldn't boot. After hours of "fun", it turns out that the issue had nothing to do with the GPU swap and all. Tons of fun!
Only that your newfound time from not having to fuck with video drivers might be enough to solve world peace.
Went from GTX970 to 6800XT.
Just drivers!
Seems weird to replace a 3080 but hey, whatever floats your goat.

I switched from Nvidia to AMD recently. As long as you have a recent kernel you should be fine. If you're running an old/stable distro you might have issues with mesa, especially if you need OpenCL or ROCm. For general use and gaming it worked for me with no fuss.
- I just replaced my 3070 with a RX 7900XT and it was a very noticeable difference in performance. It doesn't help that my primary display is 3840x1600 though. The 3070 was never particularly great for that res.
A while back I swapped out my crusty old GTX 960 for a RX 7600 and honestly, other than removing the old nvidia drivers and installing the Vulkan drivers, I had to do nothing else and I have 0 issues or complaints.
I recently did this switch to the same card and it sounds like it was as painless for you as it was for me.

An issue I had later on was that I still had some Nvidia packeges installed I didn't know about after removing them with apt. I had to fully search with dpkg to find them. They ended up being the root cause of a seemingly unrelated issue I was having trying to run a game through steam. So yeah make sure to fully purge the Nvidia drivers.
The drivers are infinitely better, and the stutter when creating a ton of windows (ie notification spam from kconnect) is basically gone.
I think the only thing to keep in mind is that Nvidias proprietary drivers work better for Linux whereas for AMD it is the open-source ones.

I have an Nvidia card and the prop. drivers have worked flawlessly for me for years.

I know the open source drivers are closing the gap for Nvidia, and they also seem to be playing ball on that front. But for AMD the open source drivers are definitely the way to go from what I understand.
If no one minds my hyjacking part of this thread.

Id also like some similar advice.

I use blender. Not heavily but have been playing on it for 20plus years.

My GPU is pretty old. 1050ti at the time nvidia was pretty much it for blender.

Im looking for a sub £300 card in the next 3 to 6 months.

Is AMD well supported by blender now. And what cards would folks recomend these days.

PS not a gamer. 0ad is about as close as i get.
- Take a look at
  
  https://opendata.blender.org
  
  From what I can tell NVIDIA still is much better for Blender at least points-wise. No idea if you'd notice it on normal usage ...
  
  Yeah looks very much like nvidia is exclusive at the top even at the price I'm looking at.
  
  The RTX4060 looks about right price vs performance. I'll spend some time looking up how well they play with linux atm. And keep an eye out for a used RTX4070 as well.
What are you doing with the 3080?
- Selling it to try make some money back.
  
  I built this PC before I even thought about switching to Linux.
  
  I have a Aoris 3070 ti and it has been problematic with Arch KDE Plasma. I never had issues with Pop and Gnome. So I’ve been thinking about getting an AMD card too, but I bought this 3070 ti at the height of the GPU shortage and spent $1000 for the stupid thing. Idk what to do with it, because I’ll definitely never get anywhere close to that kind of money for the thing.
In addition there are also often packages to get hardware acceleration of video working, if you care about saving energy / fan noise there.
Do you do AI stuff?

I've heard NVidia is better for AI

For gaming, you'll probably not notice a difference. If anything, you'll be happy due to not having to wrestle NVidia Linux Drivers :P
Rocm
Permanently Deleted
- Too many driver issues, couldn't get Wayland working despite new drivers supposedly working with it.
  
  Sorry to hear. I don't have any issues with mine and Fedora, but I've not messed with anything advanced in the user space drivers for games. I've thought about trying some feature title gaming here or there, but I am not willing to buy into a whole ecosystem of gaming or play anything that I am unable to own. As far as the kernel space driver, I have not had any issues. Fedora regularly updates the kernel and builds the Nvidia driver from source in the background with every update. It evolved a bit in how they were doing the hook and build from source. It went through a phase where it took a few minutes to build before shutting down each time there was a kernel update, but now it takes less than 30 seconds.
  
  I still don't like how nvcc (the cuda code compiler add-on for GCC) is proprietary, and that has some side effects when it comes to compiling other projects in general. However I have the version of nvcc that some projects use through pip/Python. It is the same nvcc and required files, but it doesn't require the entire dev toolkit, legalise monstrosity, or bloat of the package download directly from Nvidia.
  
  With Fedora, I run Gnome/Wayland in F40 WS as far as I am aware. My laptop doesn't have a convenient mux to use the integrated Intel graphics for the monitor separate from the 3080Ti GPU, so it is running my monitor as well. Anyways, may be there is something I'm that mix that can be an issue but isn't one for me. That's why all the bla bla bla, maybe your issue is outside of this. For me, I have no issues whatsoever. Like I was pretty worried initially about a laptop version of the 3080 having so many extra thermal interrupts and the potential for failures, but I've had nothing to complain about with daily use for over a year and some pretty heavy AI workloads. Fedora is pretty dialed, especially with the Anaconda system outside of the kernel that does the source driver build and key shim. It does all of this with a single NVME that has a Windows partition and secure boot enabled.

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