As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing prematurely due to a show-stopping bug. In any case in this article offers a fresh look at older GCN and RDNA graphics cards on Linux 6.19 + Mesa 26.0-devel.
This article offers a look at various AMD GCN 1.0 and newer graphics cards freshly tested on the Linux 6.19 kernel paired with the Mesa 26.0-devel RADV / RadeonSI / Rusticl drivers. There were OpenGL and Vulkan graphics tests conducted as well as Vulkan compute and OpenCL benchmarks with Rusticl too.
The comparison was based on the AMD Radeon graphics cards I have on-hand and weren’t busy/pre-occupied in other rack-mounted systems. But when it came to testing on Linux 6.19 with the newer AMD Radeon graphics cards, that’s where things went downhill quickly. With Linux 6.19 and also confirming back on Linux 6.18, namely with the newer graphics cards they were all hitting hard hangs — some cards more quickly than others, but on none of the RDNA3 and RDNA4 GPUs could I end up with a complete run of the benchmarks.
With these newer graphics cards on Linux 6.18/6.19 there would end up being hard hangs when running different benchmarks. I had heard of some Linux gamers and users in the forums complaining of issues but not until this latest round of testing did I discover how bad and widespread this issue was with ultimately abandoning my holiday testing of the RDNA3/RDNA4 cards due to this outstanding regression.
They were hard hangs in not being able to remotely access the system and no kernel logs archived to disk. I confirmed as well with the Valve Linux graphics driver folks that they too have encountered this behavior on Linux 6.18+ with this rather show-stopping issue. So far no issue resolution from AMD nor does it look like anyone has bisected this issue yet.
If time allows in my scheduling in the coming days I may bisect the kernel issue myself but with it being hard hangs is rather a nuisance. Ultimately will see how this very frustrating problem plays out in the coming days. This has been the most frustrating AMDGPU Linux issue I have encountered in years and rather surprising it hasn’t yet been resolved or that it made it even to Linus Torvalds’ tree with it being very easy to trigger the problem with GPU workloads.
So with that said, this comparison ended up coming down to testing the:
– HD 7950
– R9 285
– R9 290
– RX 590
– RX Vega 56
– RX 5500 XT
– RX 5700
– RX 5700 XT
– RX 6600
– RX 6600 XT
– RX 6750 XT
– RX 6800
– RX 6800 XT
– RX 7600 XT
All freshly tested on Linux 6.19 + Mesa 26.0-devel for an end-of-year 2025 comparison.
