Mid-week, a member of Valve's Linux graphics driver team updated the Mesa 25.0 documentation with an insightful note—in which, Samuel Pitoiset (lead developer of the RADV open-source driver) shared an early observation regarding AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 generation. The software engineer and his colleagues are busy getting everything finalized prior to an impending Mesa 25.0 feature freeze. Wednesday's patch notes reveal the outlook for "GFX12 on RADV"—Pitoiset seemed satisfied about "initial support expectations—he reckoned that it: "should be good enough, but it's missing two features (cooperative matrix and video decode/encode), compared to GFX11 (RDNA 3) because lack of time. DCC is still under active development, but it might be possible to finish it during the RC period."

According to Phoronix's expert opinion, the two missing features are not complete "show-stoppers" for potential buyers of first wave RDNA 4 GPUs. The site's editor-in-chief—Michael Larabel—posits that the "vast majority of those wanting to buy the Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards (when they launch in March)" will not be discouraged by the inceptive absence of RADV Vulkan Video and VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix. He added some post-publication clarification regarding the RADV patch notes: "this is only about Vulkan Video, not VA-API video acceleration... It seems some readers are taking this to mean VA-API support for the new VCN block isn't ready for RDNA 4. It's just the RADV Vulkan Video support that isn't complete." Mesa 25.0 is expected to reach a stable release stage by the end of February—just ahead of Team Red's next-gen desktop GPU launch. Late last week, an AMD official divulged that their team would be: "taking a little extra time to optimize the software stack for maximum performance" on Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) graphics cards.