Hi all,
I’m posting this since I couldn’t find any documentation about switching from NVIDIA to another card, specifically AMD Radeon, on Silverblue.
In my case, I recently switched a few systems from NVIDIA GPUs to an AMD Radeon. For example, on my daily driver I now have an Radeon 6600XT. Very nice card at a great price!
I had formerly installed (i.e., layered via RPM Fusion) the proprietary NVIDIA drivers using the guidance in the Silverblue documentation.
After taking out the NVIDIA card and installing the Radeon card, I simply uninstalled the NVIDIA driver with:
rpm-ostree remove kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
Just for peace of mind, I also removed the following NVIDIA-related kargs:
rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1
Last, I ran this to double check that I was indeed using the correct kernel driver/module (i.e., amdgpu):
lspci -k | grep amd
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: amdgpu
After all that, I’m just wondering if there is anything else I need to do to ensure the Radeon card is functioning as it should? Specifically, are there any “leftover pieces” from the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (e.g., configurations) that I need to delete or reset?
I ask because the RPM Fusion documentation itself says this:
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Recover_from_NVIDIA_installer
Recover from NVIDIA installer
The NVIDIA binary driver installer overwrite some configuration and libraries. If you want to recover to a clean state, either to use nouveau or the packaged driver, use:
rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/libGL.so.* /usr/lib{,64}/libEGL.so.* rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so dnf reinstall xorg-x11-server-Xorg mesa-libGL mesa-libEGL libglvnd* mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.saved
These are all dnf instructions, or involve removing read-only files. Of course, Silverblue is immutable, so rather glad I can’t do this.
I normally wouldn’t obsess over things like this, but I’m noticing poor performance on some games on Steam, particularly with Proton (e.g., games like Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, which runs flawlessly on my Windows 11 dual boot, and just as well on Silverblue with my NVIDIA card, but crawls to 9 FPS on Radeon). I’ve searched around a bit and found out it might be a Mesa issue with this card (see here), where Mesa just hasn’t caught up yet apparently.
I also just noticed, oddly, that Super Tux Party (installed via flatpak like everything else) runs horribly on this card, but that could also be an issue with the game itself (it’s still in alpha)… or another Mesa issue.
Just to check all my boxes, though, I want to make sure there wasn’t some extra work I needed to do on Silverblue to get the machine back to a pre-NVIDIA state, since apparently you have to do this on Workstation installs.
Thank you!
PS: For the record, on my daily driver I also changed motherboards and processors. I’m now using a Ryzen 5600X on this particular machine, if it matters.