AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT Linux Performance

The Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT graphics cards were coming right inline with expectations between the Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7900 XT under Linux. The Vulkan ray-tracing support with RDNA3 GPUs on the RADV driver has also matured a lot over the past year since the original Radeon RX 7900 series debut last November.

The performance per Watt of these new AMD graphics cards tended to be behind the GeForce RTX 4060 while when it came to the performance-per-dollar with the current GPU costs they were more competitive and near the front for delivering great value in the sub-$500 space.

Both the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers were running well on the new AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards on Linux 6.3+ and Mesa 23.1+.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards while running the proprietary NVIDIA driver continue to perform much better comparatively for Vulkan ray-tracing than the Radeon GPUs with the Mesa RADV driver. At least though this year the RADV RT support has made great gains and better utilizing the hardware. Ray-traced games under Linux outside of the likes of Quake 2 RTX tend to be Windows games running by way of Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton / DXVK.