Difficult Recommending AMD GPUs for Ubuntu Desktop

As an unabashed AMD fanboy, it is difficult for me to recommend AMD GPUs for Ubuntu Desktop installations.

Not because they perform poorly. The RX 550 I have running Ubuntu 18.04.1 Desktop with open-source amdgpu drivers passes the eye test performance-wise. It certainly feels faster than the NVidia GT 1030 it replaced, but sorry I don't have hard benchmarks to back that assertion up.

The problem with AMD GPUs comes down to one simple thing. Downloading their AMDGPU-PRO drivers. From their own website.

For over two years now, people have been on the AMD Community boards complaining about their AMDGPU-PRO driver downloads for Ubuntu are corrupted and cannot be extracted.

More than two years this has been an issue. And it appears to only be with their Ubuntu drivers as there are zero complaints from Windows / RedHat / CentOS / SUSE users. Only Ubuntu.

Here are some of the posts made about downloading corrupted AMDGPU-PRO drivers for Ubuntu Desktop going all the way back to fall of 2016:

• [Ubuntu 16.04] Can not extract amdgpu-pro archive 
• Ubuntu 16.04.4 Corrupt Driver Download 
• Broken 18.10 driver archive for Ubuntu 16.04.4 
• Ubuntu amdgpu-pro-17.50 download is empty 
• Ubuntu 16.04 RX480 driver is not there. Link is not working 
• ubuntu 
• Ubuntu AMDGPU-Pro 17.40-492261 driver file corrupt 
• Driver amdgpu-pro-17.40-492261.tar.xz to UBUNTU 16.04 LTS 
• amdgpu-pro-17.40-492261.tar.xz, for all distributions, is corrupt again 
• Linux AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 download possibly corrupt 
• New driver linux ubuntu 16 (74Mb of 226Mb) fix plz 
• Cannot extract amdgpu tar.xz

Unfortunately I ran into the exact same issue on Thursday. Tried downloading the latest AMDGPU-PRO drivers and kept getting a corrupted driver package that was only 140MB of the full 209MB file. It didn't matter whether I downloaded from Ubuntu or Windows or Firefox or Chrome or Edge or wget, I always got the same result.

@Radeon Download from https://t.co/w7SRSI4AF6 for Radeon RX 550 drivers is not working and is possibly corrupted.

For Ubuntu 18.04.1, website says file size is 209MB. When downloaded file size locally is only 140MB. pic.twitter.com/JNgZgeXket

— DevOpsBroker (@DevOpsBroker) October 18, 2018

I also opened a Service Request with the AMD Global Customer Care team. Thirty-six hours later, I was finally able to download the drivers. Which is good since I just recently had to reboot because the RX 550 decided to switch the primary and secondary monitors on its own with the open-source amdgpu driver.

This is clearly a systemic issue that AMD is unwilling to address with a permanent solution. And we're not even talking about driver performance or stability under Ubuntu, we're talking about downloading the freaking archive.

Driver Installation

When you are finally able to download and extract a valid driver archive, read through the documentation that comes with the driver. It should be found in the doc/ subdirectory of the driver's main directory.

In my case, I wanted to install the amdgpu-pro drivers with legacy OpenCL support:

./amdgpu-pro-install -y --opencl=legacy

We will see how this works out going forward now that I was actually able to download the driver archive.