The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi “RDNA1” GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.
Going back a few months has been work on supporting the AMD BC-250 with the Mesa 3D graphics driver code. As of today that experimental support for the BC-250 crypto mining board has been added to Mesa 25.1-devel for the RADV driver.
The merge request explains of that experimental BC-250 support:
“Adds experimental support for AMD BC-250 mining board.
Kernel recognizes its GPU as Cyan Skillfish.
It seems to be basically RDNA1/GFX10 but with added support for image_bvh_intersect_ray ray tracing instructions. LLVM seems to be calling this variant gfx1013.
After this set of patches applied, this chip is properly detected and is usable on modern kernels. Tested on kernel 6.12.9.
Many games are reported to work. Quake2 RTX using the ray tracing pipeline works (not very fast, but 3-4x faster than RADV_PERFTEST=emulate_rt). Custom compute load that uses ray query a lot also works reliably.”
It is noted though that the compute-only queue doesn’t work properly, some games have graphical glitches, and other bugs may persist. In any event those that have a BC-250 mining board and no longer using it to mine crypto currency can now use it for Linux graphics/gaming with Vulkan. Mesa 25.1 should be out in May with this BC-250 support.
