AMD drivers and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

I recently switched from an Nvidia card (GTX780Ti 3GB) to an AMD card (RX580 8GB). The improvement I expected wasn’t really happening. X-Plane still uses OpenGL and AMD’s OpenGL support kind of sucks. I really hope Vulkan will improve this. I also don’t want to pay double the price for an Nvidia card with 8 GB, so I’ll ride it out until X-Plane supports Vulkan.

To get most out of my system, I tried the regular Ubuntu 18.04 drivers and I tried version 19.50 of the proprietary AMD drivers. During installation of the proprietary drivers, a kernel module is being dynamically compiled for each installed kernel. With version 19.50 of the drivers this didn’t work for kernel 5.3.0 that I had installed.

I had to remove version 5.3.0 of the kernel, so I only had these kernels installed:

• 4.15.0-76.86
• 5.0.21

With these kernels I was able to successfully install the AMD proprietary drivers, version 19.50 in this case. I suspect that a newer version will also support newer kernels. I will follow this up with a post on X-Plane and FPS troubleshooting.