Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU

[harlan4096]

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 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

Continue Reading...