Hi all, I have just built my first PC ever. And having dealt with nvidia the last 5 years on Linux and experiencing the pain first hand, I went all AMD. For now, I only have the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G and this things is a beast (I’m saving up for an AMD GPU). The only thing I do is emulate some old games. I’m still getting some hiccups here and there and wanted to make sure I’m getting the best out of it. What drivers do I need to look for to get the best out of their Radeon GPU? I already have amd ucode and mesa installed out of the box. I’ve found a driver called “lib32-vulkan-radeon” in the arch repos. Do I need to install that one? If anyone is kind enough to list the packages that I need to look for and download I’d very much appreciate it. Thank you

  • @Molecular0079English
    9•1 year ago

    Yes, vulkan-radeon and the 32-bit equivalent of it, lib32-vulkan-radeon, provide Vulkan API support. They should definitely be installed if you plan on doing any gaming. I believe Steam depends on vulkan-driver and lib32-vulkan-driver, which vulkan-radeon and lib32-vulkan-radeon provide respectively. There’s also amdvlk which also provides vulkan-driver and is AMD’s proprietary Vulkan implementation. The general advice is to use vulkan-radeon though for the open source RADV implementation, although some games have been known to work better with AMDVLK.

    If I were you though, I’d just wait until some package you install requires them. The fact that they weren’t already installed just means you weren’t using any Vulkan applications to begin with. The only caveat to this statement is if you’re installing a game manually or via something like Flatpak, in which case it may be useful to install ahead of time. Up to you.

    Another thing you might consider is installing the libraries necessary for compute. You aren’t going to be doing many compute tasks on that underpowered 5700G APU, but when you do get your desktop GPU, you may want to install either ROCm, AMD’s open-source compute stack that provides things like HIP and their slightly buggy open-source OpenCL implementation, or opencl-amd, which is their tried and true, proprietary OpenCL implementation.