No. The open source drivers are better at almost everything. The only reasons to use the propriatary one is if you need some OpenCL improvements of if you are using a Radeon Pro GPU. For normal usage and gaming the open source driver will offer more performance and better compatibility.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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if you need some OpenCL improvements
As far as I can tell mesa and the proprietary drivers both use the ROCm packages for OpenCL. I don't think there's actually a difference on that front.
I honestly don't realy know. The Arch wiki says that there are some differences with AMF and OpenCL but I don't know how up to date that information is.
Yeah I had to double check as well. It actually does elaborate.
"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."
So for anything newer than the RX 500 series (anything after 2017) it doesn't matter for OpenCL it seems.
From what I can gather the OpenCL stack used to be proprietary, but they decided to open source it when ROCm came along. So the Pro driver used to be more important and now it's really only necessary for AMF since the Vulkan and OpenGL portions are straight up worse than mesa.
Mesa has its own OpenCL implementations for AMD GPUs too: Clover and RustiCL. However, Clover is not really developed any more (afaik) and lacks some important extensions, such that many programs can't use it. RustiCL is rather new, and I don't know how well it works.
I wish Nvidia was the same story
Don't use proprietary drivers and don't install amdvlk or whatever it's called, just use mesa if the Steam install asks you to choose.
The open source drivers for AMD have great performance, they power the Steam Deck and have great compatibility.
and more tested too
As far as I know, the open source drivers are recommended for AMD - my driver installer in Mint doesn't even list proprietary drivers.
Tangential: do you need proprietary drivers for ROCm?
No, I think I have the library rocm smi lib (or something like that) (on Endeavour/Arch btw) installed and it is used by btop to display GPU stats.
EDIT: The Arch package is extra/rocm-smi-lib
Usually not.
How much fps do I loose if I use the open drivers?
None.
Do science at it
If only there were an easy way...
I'm serious. Systematically install, test, and take notes on all the drivers (there are like 4 iirc). If I wasn't taking a crap right now, I could check my config and send it to you, but there is no guarantee it will work for you. Best thing to do is to do science at your own computer.
Sorry, forgot the /s