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.

  • Captain AggravatedOP
    -2•7 months ago

    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.

    • circuitfarmer
      9•7 months ago

      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.

      • Max-P
        6•7 months ago

        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.