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The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

472 points · 97 comments · speckx

  1. LaurensBER · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 · · 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. nickserv · · focus · HN ↗
            Ubuntu LTS distros can need some time, yeah. A few months is not unheard of.

            AMD typically starts adding basic kernel support before the hardware comes out, but full feature support is usually shipped shortly after hardware release. I suppose it's to avoid leaking specs before release?

            But anyway if you want good support for new hardware, much better to run some sort of rolling release, like most Arch based distros.

            Personally I run an Ubuntu LTS but with the latest mesa drivers via ppa, and am always at least a generation behind on the card. Much cheaper that way. Or at least it used to be...

            1. mey · · focus · HN ↗
              Does Ubuntu LTS really make sense as a non-workstation distro? Especially if you are using PPAs to enable functionality.
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