The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux
phoronix.com443 points by speckx a day ago
443 points by speckx a day ago
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!
I'm sure Valve probably still deserves the credit, since the Steam Deck uses a RDNA 2 gpu, but the article mentions that Timur specifically worked on gcn1.0 GPUs - e.g. radeon HD 7800/7900 from 2012 (!)
Those are pretty old but Im sure there are reasons. Valve has access to specs from their consumers through steam so maybe a large segment of the third world uses old GPUs for gaming.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, but the debugging process is the most fun part for me.
As they say, there are people whose hobby is 'cars' and there are ones whose is 'driving cars'
I would also add don't use an LTS variant (or anything based on an LTS variant) of those desktop distros
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.
I would say my 9070XT works better in Linux than it does in Windows.
I actually switched off Windows in a last-ditch attempt to get Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to stop crashing. To my surprise, it worked.
Never going back to Windows.
I bought a 9070 xt shortly after launch and it was already fine, but I am on arch so had easy access to latest kernel.
Fine is not good enough. New amd cards need a year. Is raytracing fully working (min 90% of the win11 performance) these days?
Yes, raytracing works and it’s performant. I don’t know about 90% of Windows 11 performance but I am too busy enjoying games to care about benchmarks.
Just to put things into perspective, the 9070XT is the third or fourth fastest gaming graphics card money can buy depending on the game.
The 5070Ti is $300 more than the 9070XT with similar performance, the 5080 could give you a good boost but costs even more, then you’ve got the 5090 which is a completely insane and unrealistically expensive purchase.
The 5070ti used to be more closely priced against the 9070XT but the RAM crisis is driving Nvidia card costs up faster than AMD due to the difference in RAM type.
When you think about it in that context I have to ask if it even matters that the raytracing on this card in Linux is competitive when the Nvidia side gives you a lower tier card for the same dollar anyway.
Nvidia typically has more of a performance penalty in Linux than AMD as well, so that narrows the gap further.
This idea that it must have wonderfully perfect raytracing performance has to be put in this perspective. The reality is that even if raytracing is half as fast in Linux as it is in Windows you’re still raytracing much faster than the median gamer on the market. A game that runs poorly on a 9070XT doesn’t exist.
There are also still in 2026 very few games that extensively leverage raytracing and path tracing since the PlayStation and Xbox game consoles are limited in that regard. It makes very little sense for most game developers to make their games only come out looking nice with path tracing cranked up.
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...
Does Ubuntu LTS really make sense as a non-workstation distro? Especially if you are using PPAs to enable functionality.
So I can't comment on the raytraced experience because I don't bother with the raytracing, however I found AND worked out of the box on day one multiple times now. However RT benchmarks from January show it neck and neck.
https://www.techspot.com/news/110999-new-benchmarks-show-lin...
With significant improvements still incoming.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/even-more-amd-ray-trac...
> New amd cards need a year.
Not in my experience. The 16GB 9070 non-XT seems to have been released in March 2025. I purchased one in November 2025 [0]. I observed -and continue to observe- no significant difference in graphics performance between Linux and Windows. I've also not noticed any significant difference in performance with regards to raytracing, but that might be because I have the non-XT variant, and/or it might be because I run Gentoo Linux, which probably has much newer versions of both Mesa and the kernel than most Linux distributions. I CBA to test either of these theories.
[0] Mad props to Gamers Nexus for publishing the video where they speculated that the time around Thanksgiving was going to be the "low" point for graphics card prices... so if you were thinking of buying an upgrade that was THE time to do so. They were totally correct.
i have used linux for 20 years now. I'm actually so happy we get good working drivers mere weeks after new hardware launch.
I switched to Bazzite about 3 weeks ago and am amazed at how well everything "just works". Steam and Battlenet games all running. Nvidia 5070, AMD Rizen 7800x3d, recent gigabyte motherboard.
Steam Deck amazes me, I've had it for years and it doesn't feel dated in the slightest.
It came out in 2022 and it's merely 2026 now. It's a fresh device, it has no reason to feel dated yet.
I'm running my 9070XT on NixOS and it's working great. I have Steam + Blizzard games running.
My gaming PC has a 9070 non-XT, runs Linux, and runs all but a small handful of games [0] just fine. I suspect you'll be happy with the switch.
I run games both new and old and one of my favorite guilty pleasures is looking at the Steam forum for a four, eight, or ten year old game that I've started playing because it has recently become popular again and reading the complaints from Windows users about how a driver update screwed up the game... whether because of glitchy or incorrect graphics or unavoidable crashes. Meanwhile, I'm cruising along on Proton with zero issues. :smug-face:
[0] ...that small handful includes those that go out of their way to be incompatible with Proton...
The 9070 (XT) is great on Linux if you're happy to give up RT. It works but there is a significant perf gap vs Windows.
I haven't noticed a significant raytracing performance gap compared to Windows. Perhaps I would see a big difference with the XT variant, or maybe it's because I'm running Gentoo Linux, which is almost always running much newer kernel and Mesa versions than nearly everyone else?
if you don't play esports game then you don't need to stick in windows anymore
I have AI fatigue, but the potentially for fixing bugs in old hardware is very exciting to me.
Perhaps we will even be able to reverse firmware blobs into open source alternatives?
Yeah AI is extremely good at reverse engineering compared to humans. It's one of those things were there's a huge amount of tedious but not super complex work. I think if you can set up a good harness for the agent it can probably write complete drivers.
The most difficult part is likely that a lot of hardware is easily brickable if you do the wrong thing, so I'm not going to let it loose on e.g. my solar inverter.. even though their software is shit and I'd love to replace it. (Don't buy QCells.)
I got a r9 285 in 2020 something while the crypto frenzy was still eating up all the gpus. It was 6 years old, got it for like 60 bucks if I remember correctly, best purchase ever, I got to play gta V at 60fps again.
Try to remember back to 2015 the graphics were not that bad. 4k performance was poor but for 1080p 60fps on pretty much anything.
4K is kind of pointless for gaming anyway, IMO. I've got a 32" 4K 165 Hz OLED screen and I much prefer 1080p at 165 Hz over 4K at <= 60 Hz and a pegged GPU. I don't really see pixels either way. 4K is nice for text, though!
Some other benefits of older GPUs:
Use as a dedicated GPU for encoding and decoding video. Post processing like frame interpolation or superresolution. Use for GPGPU workloads. Run additional monitors independently. Use for GPU passthrough to virtual machines. Use as a backup GPU for troubleshooting. Use for test code without breaking the main GPU
For video decode if it supports the codec you want you're set, but video encode has definitely improved on more modern GPUs. Older GPUs work but you'll likely get worse quality for a given bitrate.
Yeah, if you want good enough video encoding, there's no better option than Intel Arc graphics, maybe a box somewhere just churning B-frames
I'm so happy I didn't throw away my old laptops...
If only AMD did this.
AMD supports Mesa precisely so that enthusiasts can do this.
Nvidia doesn't, and their Vulkan stack underperforms on Linux quite significantly.
Except VFX and Hollywood have no qualms using proprietary drivers.
Even proprietary drivers can use Mesa. Most of Mesa is MIT-licensed.
It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux, and -as always- Nvidia ignores what everyone else is doing and does their own thing. Sometimes doing their own thing works out really well in the short run, but -long term- they always fall behind.
> It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux
Nvidia cares a lot about Linux. Just... on their terms.
Yeah, Nvidia cares a lot if you are using compute (aka CUDA). If you are using their pure compute offerings, they are really top of the line on performance and tooling.
Though only with commercial distros. If you're using a fixed version of RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu (which Canonical offers a commercial version), you're fine. Just hope that their support is long enough and NEVER EVER change kernel versions except patches!
If your GPU is older than 5 years, then you're in danger zone and you should have completely replaced your hardware 3 years ago and bought new Nvidia equipment now 10x more expensive!
Terms which famously caused Linus Torvalds to tell them to FU.
With fairness; some things have changed.
The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
EGLStreams actually was(is) a pretty good API, and I think most compositors would've had a much better time if they decided to implement that on top of GBM.
To summarize the difference between the two, with EGLStreams, you just request a buffer to draw into from a pool, then once you're done, you just submit it, thereby relinquishing control of it.
With GBM, you explicitly need to manage the lifetime and access of your buffers, making sure you don't leak or accidentally write it when the GPU/driver tries to, there's no clear ownership, and you have to handle surfaces for double/triple buffering.
It's a much lower level API, and much harder for drivers and app developers to get right, which was no doubt responsible for many years of buggy Wayland compositors - in fact, basically there wasn't a single correct implementation until Valve built Gamescope/their wlroots-based KWin fork and did a bunch of driver work.
Having two Mesa installations at once is how you summon dragons to fight. The FOSS Linux ecosystem doesn't really play well with multiple versions of libraries.
They care about Linux, on their own distribution and licensing terms, NVidia even has their own distro.
Like most FOSS done by companies, what they don't care is GPL, which sadly will eventually be meaningless after boomer and Gen X devs that created the GNU movement no longer walk this plane.
There isn't a single embedded OS FOSS alternative to GNU/Linux that uses GPL, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr.
Is there financial incentive for them to bother?
One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.
That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.
For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.
AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.
AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.
Surely this should be the opposite direction, no? Nvidia drivers on linux have always been trash. If anything, I would much prefer nvidia learn from amd.
Perhaps not but one of the great things about Nvidia is their latest drivers often support very old cards.
They're in the process of ending support for everything below the RTX 2000 series -
https://windowsforum.com/news/nvidia-ends-feature-support-fo...
I mean the GTX 1080 is over a decade old.
Compare it to some other products from that time:
- AMD FX Piledriver CPUs
- Skylake i7-6700K
- iPhone 6s
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- Oculus Rift CV1
- Android 6 Marshmallow
The GTX 1080 (Ti) still works for the vast majority of games in 1080p. The only thing that would really make it obsolete is driver issues.
I've been having issues with kernel updates because Nvidia dropped support for my GPUs. Apparently 9 years was the threshold for their "very old card" support because Pascal is now over.
The community can't fix it because their drivers are proprietary blobs. Open source drivers are essentially useless. I'll have to stick to something like Ubuntu to keep the hardware working without fighting DKMS every update.
This is the reason my next GPU will be either AMD or Intel.
Nvidia's latest drivers don't support GTX 1000 and older GPUs. They are barely 10 years old and are still plenty fast for a lot of software.
Maybe there’s a prestige angle to somewhat shame them into keeping up with nvidia. Though my sense is that they’re barely peers anymore in this space. :(
Perhaps René, the maintainer of T/2 Linux, will end up vibe coding an NVIDIA driver one of these days. He’s been reverse engineering and vibe coding a bunch of drivers for old graphics lately and live streaming everything.
Such legendary behaviour
I now have a 2011 or 2012+ 27" iMac everywhere I need a computer, running Linux Mint Mate, and it works better and with less frustration that any new $2500+ Lenovo workstation laptop my employers give me.
Honestly, the folks writing inference drivers for Llama.cpp / GGML would sort of benefit from better compiler work like this.
In general, Valve's work has been exceptional and supplementing AMD's own ROCM/OpenCL and Vulkan team, they've gotten a lot of defaults right and people should work together with Valve to improve support for their chips.
I wonder if some of these could carry over for LLM inference. It will be nice to turn more ewaste GPUs into capable processing units for LLM.
I have a Radeon RX 6900 XT (16 GB VRAM, originally released in 2021), and it's possible to run some lightweight models to have okayish performance and quality of output, but nothing I've tried has come anywhere close to the quality even of the models I can use for free from OpenCode Zen or the free tier of Openrouter. If you want to keep everything local on the same card I have, it requires putting up with a model that's noticeably worse in virtually every metric than what you can get for free elsewhere, and the GPUs this article are talking about are three times as old as mine.
It would be awesome if someone manages to figure out how to get small enough models to fit on older cards to be viable, but I'm not optimistic that it will come without some sort of fundamental architectural innovation rather than incremental improvements, and it's not clear if and when that will happen.
This kinda highlights the level of debt the AI companies are in, and will continue to be in, offering anything for free.
How long is this runway?
I have no clue, and I agree that it does not seem sustainable. Either someone needs to find a magic solution to making it a lot cheaper, or a lot of companies are going to need a lot of money from somewhere that isn't clear.
Define "small".
The other day I managed to get a context of 195k for Qwen3.5-9b Q4_K_M using a llama.cpp fork that supports TurboQuant:
https://github.com/TheTom/llama-cpp-turboquant
I think you could replicate this with a larger model on your device.
Overall with the right quantisations for both the model and KV cache you can get a lot of mileage out of this old hardware. Speed remains the main limitation, as IIRC I was getting ~26-30tps on a 7700S.
Opencode currently has Mimo 2.6 Flash Free with 5x that context. Like I said, it's not impossible to get something usable, it's just not in the same league as what you can get without paying anything or needing to spend effort "managing" to get it working.
I'm not saying there's no benefit to using local models. My point is still the same as before: you have to be willing to sacrifice both performance and quality even when just comparing to free models that are available today.
Yeah, but some prefer this if it means they own the infrastructure.
I spent some years in the pharma industry, where AI came really late, as there was (justified) concern that sensitive data might leak - even by accident. Eventually a solution was implemented - it was some kind of open model (they didn't say which) running on-premises.
You couldn't tell these people that this and that powerful model is free or inexpensive, because it's useless to them if it's running on someone else's computer i.e. the cloud.
With an extra 8gb of vram you could run qwen 3.8 27b pretty comfortably, which isn't quite as good as frontier models but definitely on par with free models on openrouter and whatnot.
Also you can use multiple GPUs at once, two of your GPUs could run qwen 27b very comfortably, and with great performance.
OpenRouter has Qwen 3.8 27B in its free tier right now. My point was that if a 5 year old GPU can't even compete with the free offerings, the 15 year old ones mentioned in the article aren't going to come close.
I have a 6900 XT as well. Unfortunately it is only 512 GB/s.
With AMD the best you can do in the consumer market right now is an RX 7900 XTX which is about 960 GB/s.
Most of these older cards are lacking the physical hardware for fp8 or other lower precisions that most quantized models use. Or the memory to run models at higher precision.
Memory is the bottleneck along with the lack of FP4/FP8 capability at the hardware level.
Awesome.
Is Valve funding this work in particular? How can people donate?
Assuming Valve funds this work, just buy their products. If possible, avoiding credit cards as the CC companies are trying to dictate policies about which games are acceptable and which aren't. I buy the occasional steam card with cash. I encourage everyone to shift a bit of their spending away from CC's in order to reduce the power of these companies to tell us how to live our own lives.
How do you use cash? Do you mean debit or some other digital 'cash'?
You can still buy steam gift cards at Best Buy if you're in North America, other similar retailers likely carry them in other countries. But Steam said they're shutting down the physical program at the end of the year because of scammers.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/78E3-7431-1E88-AD...
Sorry, yes, I meant how could I donate to Timur if he's not being funded my Valve for this.
+1 to buying Valve's products.
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I understand the good will of the intent but... you have to understand that those driver code paths went thru massive QA over the years. On such complexe hardware, any modifications, even believed benign, can be disastrous for some/many software actually still 'in production'.
This is very risky: one guy QA over a massive amount of software with hardly a few remaining users able to report issues of with those GPUs...
Better have a slow working well tested driver, rather than a broken driver which is supposed to be faster...
That is a valid concern in theory, but in practice, improvements to drivers for old GPUs rarely break things. There are regression tests... and part of it might be Timor being very diligent in his work.
Will Linus torvalds piss this Dev off with childish behaviour, causing the dev to leave kernel dev? Only time will tell