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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. ezst · · focus · HN ↗
        > those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates

        Unless you insist on running a server distro that's consistently obsolete by design (and if the notion of GPU comes into picture, that definitely shouldn't be the case), it shouldn't matter in practice. Every reputable desktop distro has a kernel/mesa stack that's up to date.

        1. londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
          It still takes a few years for other people to find and patch the bugs.

          ~3 year old hardware seems to be optimal for linux in my experience. Ideally a thinkpad or something lots of linux devs have.

          Buy newer and you'll be constantly finding bugs and having to apply workarounds, custom kernel builds, custom config lines, etc. just to make basic features work like the ability to adjust screen brightness.

          Don't buy anything ARM or requiring a custom bootloader - thats a constant battle with custom builds needed of nearly everything.

          1. bitmasher9 · · focus · HN ↗
            Yes, but the debugging process is the most fun part for me.
            1. torginus · · focus · HN ↗
              As they say, there are people whose hobby is 'cars' and there are ones whose is 'driving cars'
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