5700XT on Ubuntu (18.04 and 19.10) impressions, anyone else tried?

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Deleted member 89018

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Picked up a 5700XT recently and popped it into my Linux system to see how things looked.

Display is a 43" 4k TV (Visio E43-F1).

18.04 obviously hasn't been updated with kernel 5.3 and mesa 19.2 yet, so the only option there is to install AMD's driver package. (https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Ran both the open (amdgpu) and proprietary (amdgpu-pro) versions to see if there was much of a difference. The desktop mostly ran fine, with the odd issue of the mouse cursor severely stuttering - as if it was running at a much lower refresh rate than everything else (like... 30hz when my refresh was at 60hz).

Games that used OpenGL seemed to work alright - I didn't do any performance testing, just fired up a few to see if they'd run, but the "open" driver doesn't have Vulkan support on 18.04. Don't bother trying to shoehorn in mesa 19.2 or kernel 5.3, they (or newer versions) will eventually show up in the 18.04.4 release. I tried it and got all sorts of display corruption on my desktop. amdgpu-pro did have Vulkan support and I tested a few things with DXVK, it was... about 50/50 for whether a game would actually run or cause a whole system hang, though.

Slightly frustrated with the gaming experience and very annoyed a the mouse cursor, I decided to upgrade to 19.10, which does have the newer kernel and mesa versions. The actual release isn't for a few more days but I just told it to pull down the latest "development" build, which is basically the release version.

When I did this upgrade over the weekend, the "Navi" firmware files weren't included. So while the kernel and mesa versions were correct to have out of the box support, the card still didn't work. Had to grab the files (similar to process outlined here) and drop them in the right directory. They were recognized on my next boot, no config file changes needed, so I'm hoping that means they'll be included in the actual production release later this week.

Anyways, in 19.10, again performance was fine, Vulkan works in open source, and instead of getting whole system hangs in games, I'm getting just the game itself freezing (which usually causes the display to freeze as well, so I have to reboot anyways, but I guess that's still an improvement). Mouse cursor still stuttered like crazy too.

So, I'm back on my RX 580 for now.

One bit of performance testing: I did check framerates on Guild Wars 2 (which runs a D3D9 renderer and is not very efficient), runs almost as fast on my 580 as it did on the 5700XT (in the largest capital city with players around a bank, avg 21fps vs 25 fps at 4k, high settings - in Windows the newer card kept framerates above 50). I can't get it to run with D9VK, though, so I was only able to compare WINE's performance with OpenGL (on the 5700XT I didn't notice a hugely increased frame rate with Vulkan, either).

My verdict: for now, don't bother if you're on Linux. Too many issues, too many crashes, and there are probably a lot of performance optimizations yet to come. Mine is going back in the box to gather dust until 20.04 releases to see if it works any better by then. If you're running AMD on Linux and you want the fastest GPU you can get, buy a Vega card for now, or keep waiting until more of these issues are ironed out.

Would love to hear any others' experience with it.
 
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