Thread

1. LaurensBER · 1791067317 · focus · HN ↗

   I just bought a used Ayaneo 2 handheld, it has an old(er) mobile RDNA 2 GPU and I was blown away by how well this thing performed under Linux. Almost everything (that's not a recent AAA game) runs beautiful and a lot faster/smoother than it does under Windows. The experience has been so good that I'm considering switching my main pc (with a 9070XT) to Linux as well.

   No doubt Timur contributed heavily to this given Valves Steamdeck (which uses a very similar but slower GPU).

   Given the current hardware prices it's pretty awesome to see someone squeezing maximum performance out of old hardware!

   1. Gigachad · 1791070984 · focus · HN ↗

      My experience has been that for Linux you are always better buying older mid tier hardware because all of the issues and optimisations have already been worked out and those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates.

      1. drbscl · 1791102864 · focus · HN ↗

         This used to be the case, but new AMD cards were fine about 2 weeks after they released, provided you’re not on an old kernel of course.

         I can attest to this myself, my 9070 was a bit rough on launch but worked perfectly soon after.

         1. ThatMedicIsASpy · 1791107851 · focus · HN ↗

            Fine is not good enough. New amd cards need a year. Is raytracing fully working (min 90% of the win11 performance) these days?

            1. simoncion · 1791112102 · focus · HN ↗

               > New amd cards need a year.

               Not in my experience. The 16GB 9070 non-XT seems to have been released in March 2025. I purchased one in November 2025 [0]. I observed -and continue to observe- no significant difference in graphics performance between Linux and Windows. I've also not noticed any significant difference in performance with regards to raytracing, but that might be because I have the non-XT variant, and/or it might be because I run Gentoo Linux, which probably has much newer versions of both Mesa and the kernel than most Linux distributions. I CBA to test either of these theories.

               [0] Mad props to Gamers Nexus for publishing the video where they speculated that the time around Thanksgiving was going to be the "low" point for graphics card prices... so if you were thinking of buying an upgrade that was THE time to do so. They were totally correct.

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