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Planning to upgrade GPU from Nvidia to AMD. Any pitfalls I should know about? (reddthat.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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I'm running CachyOS, and having an Nvidia card, I'm using their Nvidia-specific kernel. I know this 3060 won't last forever, and I'm planning to upgrade to an AMD card for a better overall experience.

Is there anything I should be aware of regarding the kernel or other compatibility when switching brands? Can I simply plug in the new one and run pacman -Syu?

Sidenote: I will plan around my PSU's output, so no need to advise regarding physical compatibility.

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[–] 12 points 3 months ago (6 children)

If any of your workflows rely on cuda (or any form of gfx compute), you may have a difficult time achieving comparable performance. hopefully rocm is directly packaged for arch + derivs soon, like it is with Fedora, as you'll be able to use that codepath for OpenCL if they don't directly offer support for HIP or ROCm.

My typical hangups there would be like, digital film production and other forms of rendering, CAD, physics simulations, and client apps like Folding@home.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Thankfully, I don't do much GPU computing outside of simple video editing and games. Cuda was never a selling point for me; it was mainly raytracing, and generally speaking, I don't use it much anymore now that I've experienced the wow factor.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    It's almost plug&play for you then. The only thing besides following the wiki that's already mentioned is to look up AMD specific Proton launch arguments like forcing games to use FSR4.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Oh, thank you! I would have absolutely missed that little detail.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    This. As far as general 3D work, nope, just install the card and the drivers and off you go.

    But if you want to do any compute stuff on the gpu you're in for a rough time. Like 95% of that software is targeted to Nvidia. There is a bit of work going on to adapt cuda stuff to AMD (rocm and hip like you mentioned), but most developers don't support it. Last time I tried (about a year ago), I was able to get about a quarter of the software I tried half working.

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