AMD is good until you need AMDGPU-PRO, ROCm, or OpenCL. Both AMD and ROCm seem to work at the moment but only for k5.4.0-66 which is creating a lot of problems for a lot of users. Even then, apps like DaVinci Resolve show the viewers only with AMDGPU-PRO, but Fairlight timelines are just black. With ROCm Fairlight timelines are visible but it doesn’t render the video viewers. I guess that’s a problem with OpenGL.
I have an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid and OpenCL performance on Linux seems to be worse than an M1 Mac Mini.
Darktable works completely fine. I don’t know if the performance is as good as with a comparable Nvidia gpu but I’ve never had an issue with Darktable not working or crashing with OpenCL issues.
Natron doesn’t launch, Blender has issues, OBS snap doesn’t launch. Tests done under X11. However Natron and OBS snap will launch under Wayland which brings me to the worst part.
The worst part is that you can’t use Wayland with AMDGPU-PRO or ROCm. I get such a terrible screen tearing when I install one of those drivers. So I’m forced to stay with X11 forever. Even if I’d like to use Wayland for the apps that won’t launch under X, I can’t. Besides the screen tearing, Wayland session will crash very often. Sometimes you’ll get 15min of terrible screen teary session, sometimes you’ll get just 20 seconds of session time before the crash. I had an experience where I didn’t realize I was under Wayland and it crashed on me cca 15 times in 10-15 min. However if you use the drivers from the kernel then all of those issues are gone but so is OpenCL.
Now some good news seems to be that AMD is hiring new kernel developers at the moment and while we all might thing that everything will be better now. I really think they might not even employ anyone and this is just a marketing strategy for their Linux customers because AMD Linux user base has been trough a lot with them in the past 2-3 years and things are starting to boil over very rapidly now. People are fed up, they’ve spent a great deal of money just to deal with AMD’s incompetence and issues. It’s just a matter of time until press picks this up so I think this might be their attempt to calm some folks (like myself) down.
What they don’t realize is that it ain’t gonna work if the bug reports and issues still get ignored. They are just buying a month or two. I seriously hope they actually employ the people that send their CVs and that they get to testing and fixing quickly.
Don’t buy AMD gpu now. AMD sounds like a great buy for us FOSS folk on paper but the real world experience is something entirely different. And this is the worst moment to buy a GPU as the prices are very high. I think you should consider delaying your purchase at least until the summer of after it. By then we should be seeing if there is any worth investing in AMD or just go with Nvidia and have a nice life and the prices should be dropping somewhat.
Something that tells me that AMD might be doing damage control with this hiring news is that I saw AMD staff on various online forums and message boards engaging with people and trying to do some discussion management. And why I appreciate them explaining some things. I don’t think anybody cares about that. You can’t explain away 3 years of neglect and constant issues. Only testing and bug fixes can do that. I hope I’m wrong tho. I hope they just want to engage with the community and that they intent on fixing this mess. I’d be the first one to buy 5 more AMD gpus if that happens.