In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today’s embargo lift, I’ve also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.
Back during the press briefings for the Radeon RX 9070 series announcement, it was stated during the Q&A that ROCm support for the Radeon RX 9070 series would be coming but not for launch day. But as noted in that article, there is the officially “supported” graphics cards by ROCm as a very reserved list while there is also the unofficially supported graphics cards that typically work with the ROCm compute stack. There wasn’t any clarity provided by AMD over the ROCm support expectations prior to last week’s announcement.
Since last week’s announcement, Anush Elangovan with AMD posted on X about the Radeon RX 9070 series working on ROCm. But without clarity over whether it’s official support and/or the timing. I’ve been in touch with Anush and am still awaiting official feedback from AMD on the Radeon RX 9070 series ROCm compute support state and any other technical details.
But with indications of ROCm 6.3 potentially working with the Radeon RX 9070 series, I tried it out. Using Linux 6.14 Git for the latest upstream AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel drivers paired with the latest ROCm 6.3 packages, I was able to get the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards detected by the ROCm software, including working OpenCL support too.
As it’s been just a few days and lacking official documentation, I don’t know what caveats exist in this initial ROCm support for Radeon RX 9070 series but at least OpenCL is working and some level of other ROCm components. But the likes of Blender 4.3’s HIP back-end wasn’t working with ROCm on the Radeon RX 9070 series on Linux.
Stay tuned for more information as further details become available on AMD’s positioning of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards with the ROCm compute stack. For today’s embargo lift are some primarily OpenCL benchmarks for those wondering about the GPU compute potential compared to prior RDNA graphics cards and the NVIDIA competition.
