With my launch day testing of the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards on Linux the Mesa RADV driver was used given that is what is predominantly used by Linux gamers/enthusiasts and is used out-of-the-box by all of the major Linux distributions. Last week AMD released an AMDVLK Vulkan driver with RDNA4 GPU support as the company’s official open-source Vulkan API Linux driver. For those curious how the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers are competing for the Radeon RX 9070 series, this article is for you with benchmarks of both drivers and both RX 9070 graphics cards.
This testing is quite a straight-forward comparison of testing the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards using the Mesa 25.0 Git snapshot as of the original testing time compared to last week’s AMDVLK 2025.Q1.3 driver that introduced the official RDNA4 GPU support to that driver. For both Vulkan drivers, the Linux 6.14 Git kernel was in use with just swapping out the GPUs and drivers between runs.
Various Linux gaming and graphics benchmarks were carried out for seeing how these AMD RDNA4 graphics cards are running between the popular Mesa RADV driver and the official AMDVLK driver options for Linux gamers/enthusiasts.
