With the feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 25.2 expected to take place next week and kick off the release process for this quarterly Mesa 3D version to debut as stable in August, I’ve begun running more benchmarks of this latest code on popular GPUs. As it pertains to the newest AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics processors, the most exciting area with Mesa 25.2 are the Vulkan ray-tracing improvements. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the upcoming Mesa 25.2 performance for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card on Linux.
This is a look at the AMD Radeon RX 9070 performance as found out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 25.04 with its Linux 6.14 + Mesa 25.0 graphics stack compared to upgrading then to the Mesa 25.2-devel state with the “ubuntu/mesaaco” PPA for easy reproducibility. Yes, Mesa 25.1 was out in the interim, but long story short didn’t provide any significant differences over 25.0 and the common out-of-the-box experience found on the likes of Ubuntu 25.04. Once the Mesa 25.2 proper release is near, I’ll be around with more graphics cards and of doing 25.1 vs. 25.2 specifically. The intent here is just an early preview looking at namely the ray-tracing performance for Ubuntu 25.04 and other non-rolling-release users if upgrading to Mesa 25.2 for helping the performance. The Linux 6.14 kernel was used for both Mesa driver runs.
This testing was done on a Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 16GB graphics card for looking at what’s in store with the upcoming Mesa 25.2 release.
