Introduction
AMDGPU is AMD's open source graphics driver for the latest AMD Radeon graphics cards. It is a compliment to the open source Radeon driver, which works with graphics cards not supported by AMDGPU. AMDGPU is under intense development in coordination with the larger open source community. AMDGPU supports a growing number of cards, but will not be available for pre-GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture cards. This means that as development progresses, some select cards as far back as HD 7000 cards will be supported. No HD 6000 or prior cards will be supported.
Support for AMDGPU begins with Ubuntu 16.04 - which, incidentally, does not support fglrx - but it is also available for Ubuntu 14.04.5 with the HWE stack Xenial (check if the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package is installed).
AMDGPU-PRO is the open source AMDGPU driver with a proprietary overlay. What this means is that AMD's "proprietary" driver will be based on its open source driver!
This guide shows you how to use the open source AMDGPU driver for some AMD graphics cards and APUs.
Identifying your graphics card or APU
First, check your graphic card name and chipset:
sudo update-pciids #optional command, requires internet
lspci -nn | grep -E 'VGA|Display'
It should report something like this for your graphics card and/or APU:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710 [Radeon HD 4550]
If the report shows two different hardware devices, then you probably have a "hybrid graphics" system, with an iGP (integrated graphics processor inside the CPU) and a dedicated GPU.
Supported hardware
All these AMD graphics cards and APUs have good 3D acceleration support. This is not an exhaustive list.
Chipset |
Scheda video o APU |
16.04 |
18.04 |
20.04 |
21.10 |
CARRIZO |
CARRIZO APU |
|
|
? |
? |
FIJI |
Radeon R9 Nano/Fury/FuryX |
|
|
? |
? |
STONEY |
STONEY APU |
|
|
? |
? |
TONGA |
Radeon R9 285/380/380X/M295X/M390X/M395X/M485X |
|
|
? |
? |
TOPAZ/MESO |
Radeon R5 M315 |
|
|
? |
? |
POLARIS 10 |
Radeon RX 470/480 |
|
|
? |
? |
POLARIS 11 |
Radeon RX 460 |
|
|
? |
? |
POLARIS 12 |
Radeon RX 550/560/570/580 |
|
|
? |
? |
VEGA 10 |
Radeon RX Vega 56/64 |
? |
? |
? |
? |
VEGA 20 |
Radeon VII |
? |
? |
? |
? |
NAVI 10 |
Radeon RX 5600/5600XT/5700/5700XT |
? |
? |
? |
? |
NAVI 14 |
Radeon RX 5300/5300XT/5500/5500XT |
? |
? |
? |
? |
NAVI 21 |
Radeon RX 6800/6800XT/6900XT |
? |
? |
? |
? |
NAVI 22 |
Radeon RX 6700XT |
? |
? |
? |
? |
NAVI 23 |
Radeon RX 6600/6600XT |
? |
? |
? |
|
*1 → Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 with kernel Linux 4.4.0: if you find problems with the Radeon R7 M260/M265 (Topaz) or R9 M395X (Tonga) graphics cards, you can try to:
install the latest HWE stack in Ubuntu 16.04 (or install directly the latest Ubuntu 16.04.X LTS iso);
- install a newer release of Ubuntu;
install Ubuntu 14.04 (with kernel Linux 3.13.0) + proprietary fglrx driver.
*2 → it has been reported that the Radeon RX 550 graphics card does not work with the AMDGPU driver pre-installed in Ubuntu. To solve the problem you can install the AMDGPU-Pro driver (available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS only).
HDMI audio
The open source AMDGPU driver does not support (for now) the HDMI audio. To solve this problem, you can install che "hybrid" AMDGPU-Pro driver from AMD, available in this page.
See Also
RadeonDriver - The Wiki page for the open source Radeon driver.
BinaryDriverHowto/AMD - The Wiki page for the proprietary AMD/ATI driver "fglrx" which also offers 3D acceleration, and works on newer cards than the "radeon" driver. Since it's closed-source, only AMD can work on it and give efficient support, and the open-source community can generally not help you with problems.