Valve engineer keeps decade-old Radeon GCN GPUs in the game
As we reported in September, Valve graphics engineer Timur Kristóf has taken into his own hands the work necessary to keep some, now ancient, AMD GPU architectures alive, at least in the Linux software sphere. He just proposed a kernel change that would switch AMD’s GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” GPUs to the modern AMDGPU driver by default, giving cards like the Radeon R9 290 and R9 390 a cleaner path forward on Linux.
The patch targets GCN 1.1 GPUs (also known as GCN2) dedicated to Hawaii and Bonaire boards, including Radeon R9 290/390, HD 7790/8870, R7 260/360/450, RX 455, FirePro W5100, and mobile variants. These GPUs currently boot on the legacy “Radeon” driver unless users manually force AMDGPU.
Compared to the old radeon driver, amdgpu offers better performance, more display features through DC, as well as support for Vulkan 1.3 through RADV. (Note, although the hardware is 10 years old, the R9 290 still appears in the Steam hardware survey for Linux, albeit at a modest 0.25%.)
— Timur Kristóf, Valve
The engineer notes that a Hawaii card, such as the R9 390X, can still run Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 with a reasonable experience for its age, and the R9 290 series still appears in the Linux Steam Hardware Survey.
AMD Radeon HD 7790 (Bonaire) & Radeon RX 290X (Hawaii)
Kristóf also plans to enable AMDGPU by default for older GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” dedicated GPUs once VCE1 support is ready, extending active support to Radeon HD 7000 cards from 2012.
This happens at the same time that AMD is moving newer RDNA1 and RDNA2 Windows drivers into a “maintenance” branch, Linux users are seeing a decade-old architecture improved by one developer’s ongoing work, showing how open drivers can keep aging GPUs usable far longer than expected. Great job, Timur.
Source: Phoronix