New graphics card. Radeon Rx580.

[gsmarquis]

Just picked up a Sapphire 8gig Radeon 580. Anything crazy I should be aware of before I install?

Plan to run dual 4K 27” screens soon. I would like to also run a hdmi to a 65” tv in my family room for streaming etc. That one will be 30 ft away but only needs to be 1080p.

[gsmarquis]

Well I plugged it in and booted up. Looks to be just fine. Says its a Radeon 480 though.

[gsmarquis]

Is the driver Amdgpu,ati different than amdgpu?

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Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] vendor: Sapphire Limited driver: amdgpu 
           v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 1002:67df 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.6 driver: amdgpu,ati unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,radeon,vesa 
           resolution: 2560x1440~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 580 Series (POLARIS10 / DRM 3.23.0 / 4.15.0-43-generic LLVM 6.0.0) v: 4.5 Mesa 18.0.5 
           compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes 

[roblm]

Is the driver Amdgpu,ati different than amdgpu?

No. This is what the Synaptic Package Manager says about the package xserver-xorg-video-ati, which contains the ati driver:

This package provides the 'ati' driver for the AMD/ATI Mach64, Rage128,
Radeon, FireGL, FireMV, FirePro and FireStream series. This driver is
actually a wrapper that loads one of the 'mach64', 'r128' or 'radeon'
sub-drivers depending on the hardware.

These sub-drivers are brought through package dependencies.

Users of Rage, Mach, or Radeon boards may remove this package only if
they use Driver "r128", "mach64", or "radeon" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
instead of relying on autodetection.

The ati driver probably had more purpose in past years when using the older cards from 2010 (Firestream) to very old cards from 1994 (Mach 64), but I don’t know why it continues to load and be listed for newer AMD cards, which use either the radeon or amdgpu drivers. It just adds to the confusion for users as to which driver is loaded, and removing the xserver-xorg-video-ati package has no undesirable effect.

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inxi -Gx
Graphics:  Device-1: AMD Oland PRO [Radeon R7 240/340] driver: radeon v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.6 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa

After removing the package xserver-xorg-video-ati:

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inxi -Gx
Graphics:  Device-1: AMD Oland PRO [Radeon R7 240/340] driver: radeon v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.6 driver: radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa 

[gsmarquis]

So what I am running is a old generic Radeon driver and I should update to the AMD sourced driver for Ubuntu 18.04?

So I downloaded the amdgpu from AMD....listed for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I followed the install instructions there. After the install I removed the X11 ATI driver via the package manager. Then ran:

inxi -Gxx

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Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480] vendor: Sapphire Limited driver: amdgpu 
           v: kernel bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 1002:67df 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.6 driver: amdgpu unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa alternate: ati 
           resolution: 2560x1440~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 580 Series (POLARIS10 / DRM 3.23.0 / 4.15.0-43-generic LLVM 6.0.0) v: 4.5 Mesa 18.0.5 
           compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes 

[roblm]

So what I am running is a old generic Radeon driver and I should update to the AMD sourced driver for Ubuntu 18.04?

You were already using the amdgpu driver, which is the best for your video card in most situations.

So I downloaded the amdgpu from AMD....listed for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I followed the install instructions there. After the install I removed the X11 ATI driver via the package manager.

You mean the amdgpu-pro driver. Those instructions are for Ubuntu and won’t work with Mint unless an additional step is done. You should use the uninstall instructions to remove that driver. The correct instructions are found in this topic for the Radeon Software for Linux 18.20 package:
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=248059

Or here for the Radeon Software for Linux 18.30 , 18.40 and 18.50 packages:
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=272074


However, if everything on your system was running fine with the default amdgpu driver, then the amdgpu-pro driver was not needed unless you needed the OpenCL support. The ati driver had no affect on your system.

[gsmarquis]

OK. I just reverted via timeshift. I did a manual snapshot before trying the install.

This whole thing is a blur to me.

So amdgpu built into mint is not the same as amdgpu from amd but it’s better overall.

Even though the download from amd has two scripts one amdgpu and one amdgpu pro. Don’t use either of those they don’t work. They seem to work fine for me when I changed the install script to say linuxmint. I don’t really know though.

I’m going to stick Linux out until it’s second nature to me. I’m done with windows and Mac OS. They seem to take more and more control from you at each update and become more of an appliance than a custom pc.