Users of the Linux Mint 18.4 distribution won’t have any problems to get latest driver for their AMD GPU. Users of the 18.2 version will have these problems, because there aren’t latest drivers available.

I show you how to install the latest drivers (18.30-641594 at the time I wrote this article) to finally play games using Steam Play.

My system

Every system is different, this is mine:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3

GPU: AMD Radeon RX570

Graphics driver before installation: amdgpu 17.40

Linux Mint 18.2 Kernel: 4.13.0-16



Download the drivers

I just went to the driver support site and downloaded the driver for my configuration. You’ll be redirected to a list with operation systems. Navigate to the Ubuntu x86 64-Bit section and you’ll find a part for Ubuntu 16.04.5 in there. When I went there, the version was 18.30.

The file you can download there is a .tar.xz file which can be extracted with tar -xf amdgpu-...tar.xz .

Prepare/hack your system

The script checks your distro and dpkg also does it. You have to let them believe, that they are on an Ubuntu 16.04.

The way I did it: Edit the /etc/os-release file ( sudo nano /etc/os-release ). There are two important entries in there, that have to look like this:

ID=ubuntu

VERSION_ID="16.04"

Just make sure they look like this and save it ( Ctrl+O ; exit with Ctrl+X ).

Install the driver

Not it becomes interesting: I had an older driver (amdgpu 17.40) installed and planned to just install the new driver via the amdgpu-install script, hoping, that the older driver will be removed. I think that wasn’t a smart idea.

I present a solution, that I should have done. No guarantee, that anything here will work!

First, remove the old driver according to the installation manual. So just use their tool amdgpu-pro-uninstall .

After that you can install the new driver: Switch to the directory ( cd amdgpu-pro-18.30-641594/ ) and execute the install-script ( sudo ./amdgpu-install ).

Problems with dependencies

I had a lot of problems with old/wrong/missing dependencies. To resolve the problems I used dpkg -r <name> to remove the old/wrong ones. Was pretty boring and slightly frustrating, but in the end the install-script worked.

These kind of errors were pretty common:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

<name>: Depends: <other-name> but it is not installed