Paolo, it seems to me that there is rebranding going on. “Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q1.1” is obviously the more recent iteration. (The other is referencing December 2017). As I mentioned, the most recent update is 20 March this year. It’s obviously disappointing that neither give you what you want - a stable, usable display output and provision of opencl using your AMD GPU(s).
You may find that using Andreas’ method works for you; it’s a case of your mileage may vary because of the huge number of variables: which exact hardware, which Linux distro, and sometimes the way you hold your mouth
Good luck, and please do share any success stories.
Good luck, and please do share any success stories.
Heeding my own request, I am hapy to report that while the mid-April release of the Radeon Pro software resulted in instability and much flickering on my Kubuntu 18.04 official release installation, the May 3 release (definitively after the April 26 official Ubuntu 18.04 and flavours release date) - installed flawlessly and I have only noticed one glitch, that have not since been able to reproduce - a slowing to a crawl of darktable (but no other running applications).
So, I am happy to recommend downloading and installing from here the amdgpu-pro-18.20-579836 version.
I’m running AMD A12-9800 (APU with Radeon R7 Graphics - 8 graphics cores). Your mileage may vary.
Hi to all! I’m planning to buy new PC. What graphic card should I choose to have easy opencl setup and effective use in DT in ubuntu based distribution? Now I select nvidia gt1030 with 1Gb Ram. Am I right?
As I mentioned in another thread, if you’re after OpenCL performance, the “best” card you can buy is the one that doesn’t break your wallet. The more compute power you can throw at OpenCL, the faster it’ll go, generally.
If you want to go the nVidia router, and don’t mind the proprietary driver, have a look at using the Ubuntu Graphics Drivers PPA, I’m using it on my KDE neon computer get the the freshest drivers. It has worked very well for me on this computer.
However, if you want an out-of-the-box experience, I believe that AMD will soon be the better route.
If you want libre drivers, AMD is the only route.
As always, research carefully and make sure the driver you want to use supports the hardware you’re going to buy.
Its the free nVidia drivers that are not great, because nVidia does not help the people who write the free driver, while AMD at least answers questions about their hardware for those writing the free driver.
Pharonix actually has good coverage of all the video card driver stuff.
The problem with low bugdet nvidia cards I had in the past was there weak performance with the equalizier and the profiled denoise. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but OpenCl is still not fully supported by the opensource AMD drivers. There are several descriptions howto extract the OpenCl libraries from the proprietary drivers and use them with the opensource AMD drivers. So, for both vendors you need at least some parts (for AMD) of the proprietary drivers.
Since 2003 proprietary nvidia drivers are working for me. Whereas AMD proprietary drivers dropped support in AMDgpu-pro two years after I bought a R9 270X. And frglx is not working on newer LInux distributions. You will find some discussions about this “issues” on the darktable mailing lists. My R9 270X performed very well with mentioned moduls, which made it even more annoying.
The new way to use OpenCL with AMD cards on the open source drivers is ROCm, but it only supports recent CPUs (needs PCIe atomics) and certain versions of Linux. I’m not sure when it’s going to be mainlined…
Searching the web, I noticed that a number of people had problems implementing OpenCL with their AMD card. Many prefer the display drivers that come with their Linux distribution (in my case Mint), but would like to add OpenCL support through the proprietory AMD drivers provided on the AMD support page https://www.amd.com/en/support .
There is a way to do this for your card (in my case an AMD RX 570, but I am sure it will also work for AMD RX 580, 590, Vega and many others). After unpacking the drivers, open a terminal in that directory and type (or copy from here):
OpenCL installation will start after you approve through sudo (enter password).
The --headless option will keep the display drivers of your Linux distribution, but still add OpenCL. When I rebooted and started Darktable the next time, OpenCL support was automatically activated. I found the AMD drivers to be very reliable. Speed improvements are really nice, especially with ‘fast GPU’ on.
I hope this helps a few AMD graphics card users out there.
That’s how I installed OpenCL when I was running an AMD RX580 GPU. Sadly I found it unstable in other software which used heavy OpenCL calculations, so I eventually returned it and bought an Nvidia GTX 1660!
