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Showing posts from October, 2017

Running Sapphire Radeon RX 560 on Fedora 27 beta (follow up)

Following the previous blog and some investigation, it turned out the kernel package from Mystro256 COPR repository based on agd5f kernel branch (one of AMD developers) resolves the blank screen issue. That could trigger a problem for users having a new AMD graphic hardware so perhaps a warning should be written on the release. Perhaps having one of contributors be part of kernel team bringing these improvement until those patches arrive to the mainline kernel for a better user experience. Past the issue, the desktop experience with Radeon RX 560 was tremendously improved compared to the retired GTX 460 v2. Gnome on Wayland on Fedora runs smooth showing how far the open source amdgpu driver went through compared to previous years. That was also the opportunity to run a vulkan based smoke test demo on RADV, which is a counterpart of glxgears. Overall the card is excellent once missing software are installed.

Running Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GB on Fedora 27 Beta

I bought a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GB to replace the broken Nvidia GTX 460 v2 after a long years of service. It is then my first ever dedicated AMD based video-card for a desktop. The boot sequence on Fedora 27 hit a problem: a plain blank screen suggesting the card is not yet supported. Looking at Phoronix website revealed one of possible requirement missed: LLVM 5.0 which is currently not available to Fedora repository save a failed built . I filed a bug report to address the issue. Hopefully that will land on time for the official release of Fedora 27.

Considering AMD desktop card

My Nvidia GTX 460 v2 card just died after six years of service after attempting to restore it. It was the last known Nvidia card that could work out of box with open source driver. I have used Nvidia for a long time but the behaviours from the company prompt me to no longer consider that option. Currently the GPU market is very expensive to afford a good AMD card. Additionally, the nine years old motherboard needs a replacement as the venerable AMD Phenom II 940X shows its age. The onboard Geforce 8300 is troublesome to run. For now, I use a laptop until I can afford a powerful custom built desktop this time will full AMD hardware.