Thank you for the breakdown! I've pretty much always been on Nvidia GPUs since I had a computer with an actual dedicated GPU, so this is all quite new to me.

I did end up following your guide though shortly after I mentioned my questions here, since I figured they both fell under the "If they're not needed, it won't cause any harm" - I did definitely notice that during the upgrade I got a ton of notices about missing firmware for the amdgpu module, whereas after I pulled the firmware files and added them, the notices were gone after a reboot when I went to go install Liquorix so it seems to have been for the best either way.

I haven't had a chance to try out too many games yet, but I did give Halo Infinite a quick go which I did notice had a lot of stuttering previously, and it does seem to be better in that regards now! It'll also be nice to be able to use the native version of Steam, not that I have any qualms with Flatpak but as silly as it is, MangoHud can't read the media status of Spotify while under Flatpak whereas it can when running natively. I like having the media info present, and it kind of continues to light my issues with Flatpak sometimes (in which most things work, but there are always those small things that don't due to the sandboxing), but I digress haha.

Really appreciate the guide again! It all went smoothly and all the steps were laid out very concisely! I love that the steps had an explanation rather than just effectively being a list of commands to run without any context leaving me with the question of "Why should I run this", even down to the comments that you added to the various apt configuration files.