Do I actually need to do anything to go from GeForce to Radeon?
My GTX-1080 is getting a little long in the tooth, I’m thinking of going all AMD on my Linux Mint gaming rig here, but…is there anything I need to do or install or uninstall to switch to an AMD card from an Nvidia one?
I’ve never done this before on a Linux system; I’ve got my Intel/Radeon laptop, and my Ryzen/GeForce desktop and that’s most of my Linux experience.
I had a GTX 1080 and swapped to an AMD graphics card. I didn’t reinstall my Fedora Linux distro, instead it “just worked” as soon as I booted. It was very strange coming from Nvidia to have it just work lol. It’s probably best to uninstall the Nvidia drivers after that though, and make sure there’s no blacklists in your boot settings still.
Provided that the approriate drivers and binary firmware blobs for the new card are already on your system (and with a user-friendly distro like Mint, they should be), I’d expect you to be able just to plug in and go. The only extra hoops I had to jump through while sidegrading from a 1050 to an AMD card of the same era were due to my having a hand-configured kernel and X setup with no AMD drivers.
Well this was clear as mud. Thanks for everyone responding but as far as I can tell there isn’t a definitive answer to my question and I’m still at “worst case scenario it’s a reinstall of the OS.”
Next question: Has anyone made an AMD card that A. fits in the GPU bay of a Fractal Node 202 and has significantly more grunt than a blower-style GTX-1080? I think the 6700 was the most recent viable option I saw? I think? It’s been a hot minute since I went GPU shopping, but since time lost all meaning a few year minutes ago I…
Like the whole thing that made me pick the GTX-1080 I’ve got is…well I got it for free out of a machine a relative of mine was retiring, and also that it ejects all hot air through the IO plate out of the chassis, which I felt was wise given the Node 202’s respiratory limitations. Then they stopped making blower-style cards.
It shouldn’t be clear as mud. The answer is: it will work out of the box. Just try it.
As I said in another comment, I had a system running nvidia and Pop. AMD card worked with no issues and no additional software installed. I removed the nvidia stuff some months later. It doesn’t affect anything in the meantime.
The only reason it will not work would be if OP has manually configured stuff in /etc/X11 in some way. You can even have both in the system at the same time (which does require a little bit of extra configuration). Absolute worst case you check out /var/log/Xorg.0.log it tells you the config you forgot in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf 5 years ago doesn’t work because the GPU is gone, you delete it, restart Xorg and you’re good to go.
Even on Windows it’s kind of a myth. Some people are like you need to DDU the old driver in safe mode before swapping them out. You can really have them both installed it’s just going to be weird because on Windows both vendors come with ridiculous amounts of bloat.
AMD cards just works as long as your distro is reasonably up to date. No extra drivers, in fact, installing AMDGPU-PRO is usually worse unless you fit some specific use cases.
Others have said this, but just adding to the pile: I had a system running Pop and a GTX 970. I removed the 970 and installed an RX 6600 XT and had absolutely no issues (and it was the nvidia version of Pop – I simply removed the nvidia shit at a later time).
Aside from removing /etc/X11/xorg.conf because I had generated one via Nvidia’s XServer settings - nope! The custom config there did prevent X from loading properly, switched to a tty to delete the config, restarted, and was perfectly fine afterwards.
Also, unless you’re very dependant on some specific X11 apps, you don’t need Xorg any more so I reckon you should switch to Wayland for a better experience (smoother, no screen tearing, high refresh rates, better multi-screen / multi-DPI handling etc).
Yes. X11 these days usually auto-configures on its own (to my understanding, at least) - when you generate one with Nvidia’s settings it will add some stuff that is specific to the Nvidia driver, and thus once the card/drivers isn’t present, then X11 can’t start.
I had removed the drivers before swapping out the card in preparation, so I’m not 100% sure if said proprietary extensions doesn’t load because of the lack of drivers, or the lack of the card itself - probably both to be honest.
But either way, X11 wasn’t affected by the removal of the custom config, and there wasn’t ever one present until I made one via nvidia-settings (other than, it started working of course).
A heads up if you have a G-Sync monitor from that same era: it may not do variable rate with Freesync. I was ready to pull the trigger and upgrade my 1080 Ti to an AMD card when I caught that detail. So now I need to justify the cost of a new main monitor as well if I want to have smooth variable refresh. Good luck!
My Gigabyte…what’s this thing’s model number? M34WQ is AMD Freesync compatible but not Nvidia G-Sync. Wait, do either of those two technologies work with Linux?
I just upgraded from a 1080ti to a 7900xt last month and I just plugged it in and it worked. Then I uninstalled the Nvidia binary drivers and libraries.
Not an issue. I did the same thing a while ago, switched from nvidea to amd. After i confirmed the radeon was working fine i purged all the nvidea stuff
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