While AMD hasn’t released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU.
The RADV continuous integration has added a Hawaii GPU in 2025… A Linux user had donated a Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card last year to the RADV developers. To help in ensuring the support continues working reliably, it’s been dedicated to a CI box for continued testing of the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code.
The Radeon R9 290 series was introduced back in 2013. Initially on Linux the support was a mess as it was still in the early days of AMD’s modern Linux driver support strategy, but with time has continued evolving nicely with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. While the R9 290 support on Windows has been bumped to a legacy driver branch, the Radeon R9 290 and other older AMD GPUs continue to work on the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa driver releases.
The AMD Hawaii GPU is an aging target and obviously not a priority for the RADV developers at the likes of Valve, Red Hat, and others, but at least now with having CI coverage from this old GPU target is helpful in catching/preventing regressions in the support moving forward. Details for those interested in this RADV driver CI coverage for Hawaii hardware can find them via this MR.
