I just got hold of an AMD RX7800 XT to replace my current Nvidia RTX3080.
I’m likely overthinking this but from what I understand I should just be able to swap the cards then uninstall the Nvidia drivers correct?
I’m running EndeavourOS which I installed with the option to include the Nvidia drivers by default so dunno if that changes anything? I’ve been daily driving Linux for exactly a year as of this month but I still kinda feel like a newbie sometimes lmao. Thanks in advance!
(Update) I got my AMD card installed and loaded up Wayland with no issues, only thing I had to install was the AMD Vulkan drivers for Steam.
Short answer is that you don’t have to do anything.
Slightly longer answer is that you can remove all existing nvidia packages, with any boot parameters they may have required, call it a day.
Also, install the generic or AMD specific packages now. Eg. vulkan-radeon or amdvlk instead of nvidia-utils (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan)
I’ve never done the process myself, but I would probably uninstall the nvidia drivers while the system is still running, install whatever amd packages you need I know there are some vulkan packages that people need that aren’t installed by default, and then power off and swap the cards.
You just got me to remember something about a Vulkan package when I first installed Steam so gonna find the AMD package for that. Thanks!
Most distros have a vk package that steam depends on that varies based on hardware, there is a system different package for amd than Nvidia or Intel.
I don’t have an AMD card, so I don’t know, but I recall reading on the endeavourOS forums of people solving their AMD gaming issues by installing the proper vulkan packages. That is to say. You should head to the endeavourOS forums and peruse around there. You will probably find that information very quickly there.
Even if you install the drivers while the system is running, it is not recommended to remove the card while the system is running.
There isn’t anything you need to know. It’s the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it’s like, a job or hobby or something.
In case others are interested on the general compute aspect, e.g inference for self hosted AI, here is something related I found :
- ZLUDA, for CUDA everywhere, https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/ unfortunately in the process of a major rewrite https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/discussions/261 due to AMD (somehow?!) not wanting their code being used in there (maybe they did some shady RE on NVIDIA work?)
- AMD ROCm https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm and HIP https://github.com/ROCm/HIP
Seems weird to replace a 3080 but hey, whatever floats your goat.
I switched from Nvidia to AMD recently. As long as you have a recent kernel you should be fine. If you’re running an old/stable distro you might have issues with mesa, especially if you need OpenCL or ROCm. For general use and gaming it worked for me with no fuss.
