Following last week’s AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Linux graphics/gaming review for launch day, today’s article is providing an initial look at the GPU compute performance for this new RDNA4-powered ~$349 graphics card on Linux with ROCm 6.4.1.
The intent today is on providing an initial look at the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB compute performance up against the NVIDIA GeForce and Intel Arc Graphics competition as well as a few words on the current ROCm compute stack compatibility. Further tests will follow as the ROCm compute stack software support matures.
Last month AMD introduced ROCm 6.4.1 with acknowledging RDNA4 support. With ROCm 6.4.1 the Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, and RX 9060 XT are supported along with an RX 9070 GRE.
Indeed I was able to get the ROCm 6.4.1 packages for Ubuntu Linux running on the RX 9060/9070 series. The ROCm+HIP stack as well as the ROCR-based OpenCL driver. I was using Ubuntu 25.04 for all my testing and there was also able to use the upstream Linux 6.15 kernel with ROCm 6.4.1 on these RDNA4 GPUs when installing without the DKMS modules.
With the ROCm 6.4.1 stack and using the Llama.cpp/Llamafile-powered LocalScore AI benchmark, the Radeon RX 9060 XT was successfully detected. However, when running any large language models with the latest LocalScore AI benchmark ended up leading to an indefinite hang. So, unfortunately, those early AI benchmark plans were thwarted for this article.
With Intel Arc Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce graphics testing for comparison too, the tests focused on the common denominator for now of a variety of OpenCL workloads. The AMD Radeon graphics cards freshly (re)tested included the Radeon RX 7600, RX 7600 XT, RX 7800 XT, RX 7900 GRE, RX 7900 XT, RX 9060 XT, RX 9700, and RX 9070 XT. On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce RTX 4060, RTX 4070, RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4080 SUPER, RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 5070, and RTX 5080. The Intel Arc Graphics tested were the Arc A770, B570, and B580 graphics cards. Tests were all done with the very latest Linux drivers for each GPU vendor.