As part of my various year-end comparison benchmarking, I recently ran some tests looking at how the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA 4 performance has evolved since its debut near the beginning of the year. The Vulkan ray-tracing performance in particular was standing out this year as having evolved quite nicely while for conventional OpenGL and Vulkan performance the performance has been largely stable this year with its great at-launch support.
The biggest area of performance gains this year for the open-source Radeon RADV driver within Mesa has been around bettering the Vulkan ray-tracing performance. It’s been a big area of focus for Valve’s open-source driver contributors and an area where traditionally AMD Radeon has been behind compared to the NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for gaming.
Outside of performance, the big winner this year was RADV itself. AMD finally dropped its proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver options and as part of that dropping AMDVLK development to instead focus exclusively on the open-source driver code. This is a big win for RADV that started out as a Google / Red Hat engineering effort and evolved in large part in recent years thanks to the significant investments by Valve. It’s wonderful that RADV has become the one and only AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems moving forward.
For this year-end benchmarking I compared the performance of the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards from my original benchmarks in February 2025 to the latest open-source driver stack now in December for the end of year 2025. For seeing what was specific to the RX 9000 series / RDNA4 versus general optimizations, I also included the results of the prior generation Radeon RX 7900 XTX that I ran back in February too compared ot the same stack now.
The tests in February and now were done on the same Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake platform with ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6400 memory, and WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB NVMe SSD. The tests back in February were on Ubuntu 24.10 while using the Linux 6.14 kernel and Mesa 25.0-devel graphics drivers of February. For this “EOY2025” benchmarking was Ubuntu 25.10 while upgrading to the Linux 6.18 kernel and Mesa 26.0-devel graphics drivers as of 4 December.
