RADV Open-Source Radeon RDNA 4 Driver Deemed "Good Enough"

[T0@st]

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.



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[tommo1982]

If it can run games and not crash, that's all that matters. I don't even know what those things are, so I guess those are not very important for gaming.

 

[Steevo]

Remember when your GPU came with a driver CD and it had to work out of the box?

 

[AusWolf]

Maybe they're really working on the driver, and not negotiating a price adjustment with retailers after all? Or maybe it's both?

Anyway, I'm glad that day-1 Linux support will be ready.

 

[OSdevr]

Remember when your GPU came with a driver CD and it had to work out of the box?

For manufacturer drivers it's expected. For open source drivers to be available at launch is quite the achievement.

 

[Beermotor]

For manufacturer drivers it's expected. For open source drivers to be available at launch is quite the achievement.

This isn't about the driver being available before the cards launch, it's about RADV being available for Mesa 25.0 before they freeze new code commits before release. Code has to be frozen in software development or the developers will never stop and it'll delay your release indefinitely.

"Good Enough" means it's good enough to ship and the final RADV driver will be in Mesa 25.1 or something.

 

[Denver]

Valve seems to be optimizing drivers better than AMD itself in some cases—or is Linux simply less cluttered than Windows?

 

[Neo_Morpheus]

Valve seems to be optimizing drivers better than AMD itself in some cases—or is Linux simply less cluttered than Windows?

AMD have their priorities and Valve theirs.

In the end, it works out fine for the users. Normally, it brings a nice OOTB experience that is truly plug and play, since the user dont have to do anything to get their system running.

Ngreedia, on the other hand….well.

Yes, Linux has less overhead, less services and unnecessary crap than windows.

 

[BlaezaLite]

Does this effect streaming at all?

If not sign me up, as in RIGHT NOW!!!!

 

[AusWolf]

Valve seems to be optimizing drivers better than AMD itself in some cases—or is Linux simply less cluttered than Windows?

Valve has nothing to do with drivers as far as I know. AMD's drivers are open source, Linux devs build it into the kernel. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, Linux has less overhead, less services and unnecessary crap than windows.

Yep, that too.

 

[wNotyarD]

If it can run games and not crash, that's all that matters. I don't even know what those things are, so I guess those are not very important for gaming.

As a gamer on Garuda with a RX 7900 XTX using RADV, I can say there's no crashes at all. RADV only fails badly at raytracing, it's too slow in comparison to AMDGPU.

 

[igormp]

Valve has nothing to do with drivers as far as I know. AMD's drivers are open source, Linux devs build it into the kernel. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Valve does tons of work on RADV, not AMD. See one example:

Valve's Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

AMD doesn't contribute much to RADV, their vulkan driver is the amdvlk one, and they also have a "pro" closed source one.

 

[AusWolf]

Valve does tons of work on RADV, not AMD. See one example:

Valve's Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

AMD doesn't contribute much to RADV, their vulkan driver is the amdvlk one, and they also have a "pro" closed source one.

Ah, I see. I didn't know there were different drivers available. Thanks for the info.

Now I just wonder if RDNA 4 will be supported by the official AMDVLK driver / Linux kernel on launch.

 

[igormp]

Ah, I see. I didn't know there were different drivers available. Thanks for the info.

Now I just wonder if RDNA 4 will be supported by the official AMDVLK driver / Linux kernel on launch.

Yeah, the GPU stack overall is a bit messy and has multiple layers. If you're interested, you can give a read at this site:

An introduction to the Linux graphics stack › FLUSP - FLOSS at USP

Free Libre Open Software group at USP

flusp.ime.usp.br

Trying to simplify it a lot: you have the actual hardware driver (AMDGPU), and on top of those you also have different drivers for the different APIs, such as vulkan, opengl, opencl and whatnot.