For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing “Radeon” driver. This can mean better performance, Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using that older Radeon driver.
Timur Kristóf as a prominent member of Valve’s Linux graphics driver work the past several years has recently been working on enhancing the GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.0 support with the AMDGPU driver. AMDGPU is what’s used by default for all AMD GPUs from GCN 1.2 and newer up through all current-generation RDNA and CDNA products.
GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPU support has long been available with the AMDGPU driver as a run-time option but not enabled by default due to some feature limitations and lack of widespread testing. It was only with GCN 1.2 where AMD was comfortable in making the change and implementing newer GPUs just on that AMDGPU driver code path. Timur in recent months worked through analog video connector support for the AMDGPU driver as one of the feature gaps between the Radeon and AMDGPU drivers. There were also VCE 1.0 video coding work for AMDGPU and other patches worked on as part of this effort.
So this Sunday Timur sent out the patches that go ahead and propose GCN 1.1 by default for the AMDGPU driver now that no limitations should remain with the latest upstream Linux kernel code in DRM-Next. Timur explained the situation and prospects well with today’s patch series:
“Now that analog connector support is merged in DC, amdgpu has reached feature parity with the old radeon driver on CIK dedicated GPUs.
This series refactors how the default driver for SI/CIK is determined, adds a “-1” option for default, and makes it possible to determine the default depending on the chip. This way we can make sure to keep using radeon on those chips that are not at feature parity yet.
As a reminder, CIK dedicated GPUs are the following: Hawaii (2013~2015): Radeon R9 290 and 390 series Bonaire (2013~2016): Radeon HD 7790/8870, R7 260/360/450, RX 455, FirePro W5100, etc. and their mobile variants.
Why?
Compared to the old radeon driver, amdgpu offers better performance, more display features through DC, as well as support for Vulkan 1.3 through RADV. (Note, although the hardware is 10 years old, the R9 290 still appears in the Steam hardware survey for Linux, albeit at a modest 0.25%.)
What can these GPUs actually do on amdgpu?
Hawaii (eg. R9 390X) can even play modern games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 and gives a decent user experience considering the age of the hardware. Bonaire can play games from its era well.
Looking forward to reviews and feedback!
ps. After VCE1 support is merged, I would like to also enable amdgpu by default on SI dGPUs.
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Exciting as well that the even older GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” GPU support by default for AMDGPU will likely follow in a future patch series.
Hopefully everything goes well and this change-over lands. It’s getting tight for potentially finding this in the upcoming Linux v6.19 kernel series merge window but otherwise hopefully everything pans out for the follow-on kernel series that will likely be Linux v7.0 in 2026.
