The Radeon RX 590 Is Finally Running Strong On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 6 December 2018 at 02:39 PM EST. 30 Comments
RADEON
It took the better part of a month since the debut of the latest Polaris hardware refresh, but with the latest AMDGPU kernel driver patch posted today, the AMD Radeon RX 590 now appears to be in great shape with the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack for Linux.

A few days ago I wrote about a few kernel patches and new firmware binaries for getting the Radeon RX 590 working on Linux. That was the case only to find that under 3D load, there were GPU hangs. With a new patch posted today, those hangs under load are corrected.

This patch is what was posted by AMD today for adjusting the voltage handling when switching to the highest GPU core clock frequency. I've built a kernel with this latest patch and indeed I now have various Vulkan and OpenGL Linux games running strong on the retail RX 590!


Sent in yesterday to the DRM tree for merging to the mainline Linux kernel in the coming days is the initial RX 590 patches around the new firmware handling. So that just leaves today's patch that will need to be applied against Linux 4.20 Git (after the next drm-fixes pull request) or to DRM-Next for making the Radeon RX 590 happy on Linux... But hopefully this patch will soon work its way into drm-fixes too for appearing in the Linux 4.20 kernel that will be released as stable later this month. It remains to be seen if these patches will get picked up for back-porting to the current Linux 4.19 stable series.


Over in user-space I am testing with Mesa 19.0-devel built against LLVM 8.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA for the best OpenGL/Vulkan experience.

Now that the RX 590 is running stable, in the next few days I'll finally have out the initial Linux benchmark figures on this sub-$300 graphics card.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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