Hello. I was hoping to run some tests on proprietary drivers for my GPU and in Manjaro Settings Manager/Hardware Configuration there is no “Automatically install proprietary driver”, only “Automatically install open-source driver”.
I’m using 6.12.17-1 Kernel, XFCE desktop environment.
What do I do?
Hi @vladroot, and welcome!
As far as I (the owner of an Nvidia card) know, the drivers for (the) AMD cards are baked into the Kernel. So you don’t have to do anything extra.
Oh, so there is no option to install properietary driver? Or are those for AMD no differ with open-source?
You might want to have a read of AMDGPU PRO - ArchWiki:
This page describes close source drivers for AMD GPUs.
Tip: Most users do not need these proprietary drivers.
Purpose of proprietary components
AMD releases their open source drivers via standard distribution channels. And they also periodically do releases of their Radeon Software for Linux suite, which includes both open and proprietary components. Open source components are not needed from there, and proprietary components are repacked from the latest ubuntu lts version. They are published in AUR in the amdgpu-pro-installer package base.
Comment by John Bridgman from AMD explaining why they still package close source drivers:
These days our packaged drivers are mostly intended for:
- customers using slower moving enterprise/LTS distros which do not automatically pick up the latest graphics drivers - we offer them both open source and proprietary/workstation options
- customers using workstation apps who need the extra performance/certification from a workstation-oriented driver (although Marek has done a lot of great work over the last year to improve Mesa performance on workstation apps)
- The third target audience is customers looking for ready-to-go OpenCL, either for use with the packaged open/closed drivers or with the upstream-based stack in a recent distro.
There are several proprietary components: OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan and AMF. Sometimes you may want to use these components due to specific features that open source components may lack.
AMDGPU PRO OpenGL is a proprietary, binary userland driver, which works on top of the open-source amdgpu kernel driver. From Radeon Software 18.50 vs Mesa 19 benchmarks article: When it comes to OpenGL games, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver simply dominates the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver. Users of graphic cards other than Radeon Pro are advised to use the amdgpu graphics stack. Mostly used because of lacking compatibility layers that some software relies on. See gentoo wiki linked below.
AMDGPU PRO Vulkan - required dependency for AMF.
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.
AMDGPU AMF - used for gpu encoding/decoding.
Installation
For proprietary OpenGL implementation, use the amdgpu-pro-installer package base. It contains all the following packages:
- amdgpu-pro-oglpAUR: For proprietary OpenGL implementation
- lib32-amdgpu-pro-oglpAUR: For proprietary OpenGL implementation 32 bit applications support
- vulkan-amdgpu-proAUR: For proprietary Vulkan implementation
- lib32-vulkan-amdgpu-proAUR: For proprietary Vulkan implementation 32 bit applications support
- amf-amdgpu-proAUR : For Advanced Media Framework implementation
Note: OGLP is not a performance optimization of opengl, it is an all-new GL driver codebase written from scratch, based on the PAL architecture. in version > 22.20.5 it replaces the libgl
For available OpenCL implementations see GPGPU#AMD/ATI.
(Wiki article continues)
Of course, I will add the usual disclaimer that the AUR is not officially supported by Manjaro.
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