Should I use the proprietary drivers? How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers? I use ChimeraOS (Arch Linux)
No. The open source drivers are better at almost everything. The only reasons to use the propriatary one is if you need some OpenCL improvements of if you are using a Radeon Pro GPU. For normal usage and gaming the open source driver will offer more performance and better compatibility.
if you need some OpenCL improvements
As far as I can tell mesa and the proprietary drivers both use the ROCm packages for OpenCL. I don’t think there’s actually a difference on that front.
I honestly don’t realy know. The Arch wiki says that there are some differences with AMF and OpenCL but I don’t know how up to date that information is.
Yeah I had to double check as well. It actually does elaborate.
“AMDGPU PRO OpenCL - used because Mesa OpenCL is not fully complete. Proprietary component only for Polaris GPUs. The onward GPUs use the open ROCm OpenCL.”
So for anything newer than the RX 500 series (anything after 2017) it doesn’t matter for OpenCL it seems.
From what I can gather the OpenCL stack used to be proprietary, but they decided to open source it when ROCm came along. So the Pro driver used to be more important and now it’s really only necessary for AMF since the Vulkan and OpenGL portions are straight up worse than mesa.
Don’t use proprietary drivers and don’t install amdvlk or whatever it’s called, just use mesa if the Steam install asks you to choose.
The open source drivers for AMD have great performance, they power the Steam Deck and have great compatibility.
Tangential: do you need proprietary drivers for ROCm?
Usually not.
How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers?
None.
Do science at it
I’m serious. Systematically install, test, and take notes on all the drivers (there are like 4 iirc). If I wasn’t taking a crap right now, I could check my config and send it to you, but there is no guarantee it will work for you. Best thing to do is to do science at your own computer.
