Do I actually need the manufacturer's graphics driver on Linux, or is the built-in one enough?

Which you need, concretely:

Install nothing if you want a desktop, video, and games. The in-kernel driver plus your distribution's graphics stack is the best-supported path and the one everything is tested against.

Install the vendor package if you need the compute stack for machine learning or professional applications that require it.

Two things that are commonly mistaken for needing a driver:

• Firmware. The card needs binary firmware blobs, which come from a separate package, usually installed by default. A card that shows a very low resolution or fails to initialise is often missing firmware rather than a driver.
• A card newer than your kernel. In-kernel support arrives with kernel versions, so a card released after your distribution's kernel may genuinely not be supported yet. The fix there is a newer kernel, which several distributions offer as an option, not a vendor driver.

That second one is the real case behind most "I need the latest driver" situations.

The reason it works already is the important part: the driver for that card is in the kernel. It is not something you install, it ships with the system, and for AMD cards it is developed by the chip maker in the open and merged upstream.

So the default state is a working, supported, well-integrated driver, and for the overwhelming majority of users that is where the story ends.

What the downloads add:

• The card manufacturer's download page is nearly always the Windows driver, or an outdated copy of the vendor package. Board partners do not write Linux drivers. This one you can ignore.
• The chip maker's packaged driver is a professional stack aimed at compute workloads and specific certified distributions. It brings userspace components — compute runtimes, professional application support — rather than a different display driver.

So the question is not which driver, it is whether you need those extra userspace pieces.

A caution about the vendor package that is worth stating plainly: it pins itself to specific distribution releases, and it can leave you unable to upgrade.

It replaces parts of the graphics stack with its own versions. When your distribution moves to a new release and the vendor has not published a build for it, you are choosing between removing the package and staying put.

So if you do not have a concrete requirement that only it satisfies, not installing it is not laziness — it is avoiding a dependency that constrains the machine for years.

And if you do install it, note somewhere that you did, because a future upgrade failing with graphics errors is otherwise a genuine mystery.

Quick way to see what is actually driving the card right now, before installing anything:

lspci -k | grep -A 3 -i vga

That shows the device and the kernel module in use. If the expected module is listed as in use, the driver is loaded and working, and anything you install is adding userspace rather than fixing the display.

If no module is in use, that is the case where something genuinely is missing — and it is usually firmware or kernel age rather than a downloadable driver.