AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX + RX 7900 XT Linux Support & Performance

Once focusing on the Radeon RX 7900 series testing from the older Ryzen 9 5950X platform, the Linux testing went off smoothly. Especially when it comes to the OpenGL driver with RadeonSI Gallium3D, that was completely trouble-free. The OpenGL compatibility and performance was in great shape thanks to building off the mature RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and that having been done by AMD directly.

The RADV driver worked on by Valve, Red Hat, Google, etc, did have a few warts that will hopefully be quickly removed. With Grand Theft Auto V for example there was some minor corruption appearing during gameplay. Meanwhile for the game HITMAN 3 it was hanging when running on DRM-Next with an AMDGPU kernel error but worked fine on the 6.0 and 6.1 kernels.

With RADV the games F1 22 and Cyberpunk 2077 via Steam Play were having troubles launching on the Ryzen 9 5950X system without hanging... But back during the original testing with the Ryzen 9 7950X system, they hadn't any hanging issue launching but alas there was the performance problem with the Zen 4 system.

Aside from the few hiccups with the RADV testing, it was a nice launch day experience for the Radeon RX 7900 series. I'm confident the RADV developers will have those issues and more performance tuning with the Radeon RX 7900 series over the days ahead. Particularly if you don't mind running Mesa Git, the early driver issues shouldn't be much of a concern as they should be quickly sorted out and we've seen over time how quickly Valve engineers can tackle game issues and open-source Radeon driver performance optimizations.

On the kernel side, I was impressed with the quality even going back to the Linux 6.0 kernel. Using the latest Linux 6.0 point release available is recommended as AMD has back-ported some RDNA3/GFX11 fixes to the Linux 6.0.x point releases. Linux 6.1 was delivering similar performance to Linux 6.0 while on the way with DRM-Next for the in-development Linux 6.2 are some notable performance optimizations.

Here is a look between Linux 6.0 and the AMDGPU code to appear in Linux 6.2 for looking at the performance optimizations coming down the pipe and a look at how the RX 7900 series is performing in various games... Again, using the Ryzen 9 5950X system due to the Ryzen 9 7950X issue as outlined on the prior page.

Both graphics cards were enjoying some performance gains when using the DRM-Next code for what will be found in Linux 6.2.

The gains with DRM-Next weren't universal but for some games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider running on RADV saw similar performance across all three tested kernels.

Linux 6.0.9 was in good enough shape for handling these new high-end AMD Radeon graphics drivers on a fully open-source stack.

The RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL support was consistently in great shape for these Radeon RX 900 series graphics cards.