Hi, have been running Solus with Device-1: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] driver: nvidia v: 430.26 with great success (nvidia-smi is useful for load/temp monitoring). It's giving noticably low fps in certain scenes of some games so I've just purchased a second hand AMD RX580.

Rather than the default and games-wise a bit slow os driver and then nvidia's driver there appear to be a number of AMD card drivers. amdgpu-pro, amdgpu-open, amdvlk, mesa.. it seems the open source mesa drivers are pretty good for gaming nowadays? (initial impression from having read on the Phoronix site).

-What driver is the best for fps in somewhat demanding games?
-Is there a driver that comes with something like nvidia-smi for querying about load, vram usage and gpu temp? (I think not)
-What is the best way of going about doing this gpu replacement, i.e can I just shut the machine down, switch the hardware, power it up, see enough interface in order to install your recommended driver?

I am fairly certain that the AMD drivers are open source and should all be part of the Linux kernel and Mesa. I don’t think you really need to do any configuration, the default drivers are pretty much the best and work really good. Just use the defaults that get automatically used when you use your GPU, there really is now point in installing any other drivers. Amdvlk is just a Vulkan driver and might have better FPS in some Vulkan games but it’s very minor from what I can tell. Ams gpu-pro is the non open source driver and it is not really better than the open source ones.

Compared to Nvidia, Amd actually helps out with open source driver development and cares for Linux...

I extend that question to a "full" hardware replacement from Intel/Nvidia to AMD (CPU, GPU, Motherboard and Ram), because of the upcoming Ryzen CPU's and Navi GPU's.

    HolySoap I will definitely do the same thing next time I build my self my own computer again. Especially with Ryzen 3000 seeming wonderful and AMD gpus having wonderful open source drivers 👍

      One of the main reasons for the transition to Solus is an excellent support for hardware from Amd.
      In particular, my video card Radeon 530.
      Unlike the rest of the distros, where the sufferings started when the games started.
      As an example Arch Linux. What I just did not do, which only the driver did not put - Solus was more productive.
      Shot a video about it In Russian.. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa1Wo3ira0c
      What such developers Solus filed me and is unknown. But the graphics work fine!
      Sorry for my English.

        youswer Never apologize for speaking a non native language, that's an ability many people don't have. 😉

          Jacalz Well I shut down, replaced the graphics cards, started up...to black screen and blinking cursor. Luckily this is what happened the first time I installed (with the Nvidia card) and that one is well documented. Got to a terminal the same way, alt+f2.

          Inxi -G gives : Graphics: device-1: AMD Ellesmere (list of models) driver: amdgpu
          v: kernel
          Display driver: X.Org...
          driver: nvidia

          I removed nvidia-glx-driver-current and nvidia-glx-driver-32bit and rebooted..this time to a black screen without the blinking cursor. Alt+f2 and back into the terminal: Inxi -G says the same.

          How do I fix this then? : ) I haven't installed any other nvidia drivers than those I removed and as per above I shouldn't have to install any AMD drivers to get the OS to use the mesa ones. Help : )

              Ephebopus Oh, my bad. You can reboot if you don’t have proprietary Nvidia drivers installed but the you will have terrible performance.

              Anyhow, have you tried removing nvidia-glx-driver-common? Try doing it with sudo eopkg rmf nvidia-glx-driver-common, should remove any leftovers if there are any. If that doesn’t work I don’t really know. Hope this helps 🙂

                  Jacalz That did it, at least as far as getting to the desktop. Resolution looks good too, now to run some GLMark2. Thanks!