Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older “Radeon” DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support.
Video Coding Engine 1.0 (VCE 1.0) is found with the GCN 1.0 graphics cards and Piledriver APUs for H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC video acceleration. VCE 1.0 is supported by the Radeon kernel graphics driver but was never wired up to the newer AMDGPU kernel driver.
Timur has been hacking on VCE 1.0 support for GCN 1.0 GPUs as one of the remaining features missing from AMDGPU compared to the Radeon driver support. Timur announced yesterday that it’s working although cleaning up the code may take a few more days.
The code is currently being staged via this ven_vce1 Git branch for those wanting to help in testing.
With these remaining limitations of GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU driver being filled, it will be interesting to see if in 2026 that they finally default to using the AMDGPU driver for this original Graphics Core Next hardware. AMDGPU driver use is needed for Vulkan support, better performance, and all around a better maintained open-source driver compared to the older Radeon code that is still in the mainline kernel but much less maintained or updated these days.
