Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.
The review embargo is now up and we are free to share the performance figures and other Linux driver information for the Radeon RX 9070 series. This first article today is looking at the Linux gaming/graphics performance while there is a second article focusing on the GPU compute performance (AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance). There will be follow-up articles over the coming weeks as the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux driver support matures with new performance optimizations and other improvements.
What you’re probably wanting to know first up as a Linux gamer/enthusiast… All of the Radeon RX 9070 series support is upstream in the Linux kernel and Mesa. For my pre-launch testing I have been successfully using the upstream code within the Linux kernel and Mesa — no yet-to-be-merged code or any experimental branches or anything along those lines.
On the kernel side, Linux 6.12 LTS and newer is what’s recommended for the Radeon RX 9070 series. Linux 6.12 is last year’s Long Term Support kernel version and fortunately the RX 9070 series support should be “good enough” for those using that version. But as is typically the case with new hardware support at launch, the newer the kernel the better. So if able to, using Linux 6.13 stable is recommended and the Linux 6.14 kernel will be out later this month. For my testing I was using Linux 6.14 Git to enjoy the most up-to-date AMD open-source driver support available.
AMD has tested the Radeon RX 9070 series to be working out-of-the-box on the likes of Fedora 41 or with Ubuntu 25.10 as well when fetching the latest AMDGPU firmware files. The needed RX 9070 / RDNA4 firmware files are all upstream in linux-firmware.git, so make sure you have those bits as well if planning to buy a Radeon RX 9070 series graphics card.
On the Mesa driver side, Mesa 25.0 or Mesa 25.1-devel is what’s needed. Mesa 25.0 stable is available for a few weeks now whole using Mesa 24.3 stable with the AMDGPU LLVM back-end may work but with some bugs. For those wanting the latest and greatest RadeonSI Gallium3D/OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support, Mesa 25.1-devel Git continues to see new optimizations and features enabled. For my testing I was using a Mesa 25.1-devel snapshot from last week using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 24.10.
AMD will presumably be releasing a new AMDVLK driver soon for those wanting to use that official AMD Vulkan Linux driver with RDNA4 GPUs. As of writing no AMDVLK release for RDNA4 is yet available but most Linux enthusiasts/gamers tend to be using the Mesa RADV driver.
For those wondering about ROCm / OpenCL compute support, that is covered separately in the other article today (AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance).
For my Linux graphics/gaming tests of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT, it’s all based on using the upstream linux-firmware.git, Linux 6.14 Git as of last month, and Mesa 25.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA. This was very easy to get going on Ubuntu 24.10 using this upstream open-source graphics driver stack and the first RDNA4 GPUs.
The Radeon RX 9070 series Linux experience was stable (I didn’t encounter a single hang / kernel oops or any other problems like that!) and was smooth from desktop to gaming. It was a very pleasant initial AMD RDNA4 experience on Linux. This was a great at-launch experience using the upstream and open-source driver support from AMD. The one thing though… There’s room left for performance optimizations. The main downside of my initial Linux testing was that the performance wasn’t as great as what’s been reported under Windows 11 with the official Radeon Windows driver. Relative to the Radeon RX 7900 series on Windows, the RX 9070 performance on Linux was less enticing right now. Similarly, the NVIDIA Linux performance was tougher competition.
No doubt over the coming weeks there will be more AMD Linux performance optimizations from the AMDGPU kernel driver to the Mesa RadeonSI and RADV drivers to further enhance the performance… Just as it’s routinely been for years with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code.
Thanks to AMD for supplying the Radeon RX 9070 / RX 9070 XT review samples for launch-day Linux testing at Phoronix. AMD supplied the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 and PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 XT “Reaper” graphics cards as the review models.
