I recently built a new pc and since I switched from Windows to Lunux (Kubuntu) I got an amd gpu (6700 XT). Because people told me it is less of a hassle than Nvidia. It works fine out of the box, but the choice of drivers confuse me. For gaming is the default amdgpu good enough? Is amdgpu-pro the same as the official Radeon drivers from amd? Are they better for gaming? Is Mesa yet another driver or something in addition to a driver? Why are there no settings/gui anywhere (using the default amdgpu)?
Yes and no.
You need
amdgpu-proif you want AMD’s AMF hardware acceleration; otherwise, you will be relying on MESA’s open source implementation of hardware acceleration, VAAPI.Oh, got it. But VA-API works fine as far as I can tell. Is there any reason I should favor AMF instead?
I have never run the
amdgpu-prodriver, so I can’t say if AMD AMF is better, the same, or worse than VA-API, and I can’t find any up-to-date benchmarks… so your guess is as good as mine. I do stream my games at 1080P usingamdgpuMESA VA-API, and overall I’d say the performance is not as good as Nvidia’s NVENC / NVDEC support; however, it is passable. Whether 1440 or 4k streaming is acceptable with VA-API, I don’t know…If I had to hazard a guess, I would say your best option is to stay with
amdgpuMESA VA-API because there are tons of benchmarks for over a decade that show the open source MESA Vulkan support usually beatsamdgpu-proclosed source vulkan support.