Lead RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has provided some insight into the support expectations for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 “RDNA4” graphics cards.
This month there’s been many RADV improvements around RDNA4 and its GFX12 graphics IP to land in Mesa 25.0. Ahead of the imminent Mesa 25.0 feature freeze / code branching, Samuel has provided a statement on the RDNA4 support expectations. Presumably the Valve Linux graphics team has already been seeded early hardware from AMD as part of their RADV driver work.
In a patch adding to the Mesa 25.0 documentation, Samuel Pitoiset noted:
“This initial support should be good enough but it’s missing two features (cooperative matrix and video decode/encode) compared to GFX11 (RDNA3) because lack of time.
DCC is still under active development but it might be possible to finish it during the RC period.”
The initial lack of Vulkan Video and VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix at least won’t be a show-stopper to the vast majority of those wanting to buy the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards when they launch in March. Delta Color Compression (DCC) is important for performance but as noted that will hopefully be wrapped up in the coming weeks while Mesa 25.0 is still going through its release candidate period.
Mesa 25.0 is working its way toward a stable release hopefully by the end of February, thus should be out ahead of the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards expected to ship in March. The RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver support should be in good shape too given that it’s worked on by AMD engineers. It’s nice knowing the RADV support for RDNA4 should also be in “good enough” shape for launch day. Over in kernel space, it’s likely Linux 6.13~6.14 as the baseline for the necessary AMDGPU kernel graphics driver support. We’ll see when the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards ship with our Linux testing.
