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.

  • 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.