Longtime Leading AMD Linux GPU Driver Developer Now Working For Valve
It seems that Valve isn’t done expanding their open-source Linux graphics driver team and securing top talent for enhancing the Linux GPU drivers for a better gaming experience. One of the foremost leading Mesa developers has left AMD to join Valve… ⌘ Read more
ROCm 7.0.0 vs. ROCm 7.2.3 Performance On The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700
With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the use … ⌘ Read more
Older AMD GPUs Score Another Open-Source Driver Win From Valve: DRM Format Modifiers
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux open-source graphics driver team isn’t done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that w … ⌘ Read more
Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more
Running Four Intel Graphics Cards Under Linux On Ubuntu 26.04
It’s been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GP … ⌘ Read more
Linux Scheduler Work Helping Boost Gaming Performance On Old “Potato” Hardware
Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a “potato” – an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too… ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Radeon Driver For R300 Through R500 GPUs Sees Big Code Cleanup In 2026
The open-source Radeon “R300g” driver living within the Mesa codebase for supporting the aging ATI (AMD) Radeon 9500 “R300” through Radeon X1000 “R500” series graphics processors is going through a big code restructuring as part of a big undertaking in 2026… Yes, 24 years after the ATI R300 GPUs first released, thanks to a devoted open-source developer fan, there is a significant improvement in the works… ⌘ Read more
Vulkan 1.4.351 Brings Six New Extensions, Including A Ray-Tracing Improvement
Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more
Intel IGC 2.34.4 Compiler Brings Many Improvements
The Intel Graphics Compiler “IGC” 2.34.4 release is out today as this compiler used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL compute on Intel graphics hardware plus is also used as the graphics shader compiler under Windows… ⌘ Read more
HP Z6 G5 A Continues Working Out Well For Linux-Friendly, High-End Workstation
In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I’ve been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to … ⌘ Read more
AMD RadeonSI Code Reorganized To Support Multimedia-Only Driver Builds
Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU “Power Module” To Better Align With Windows
Sent out today was a batch of “new stuff” for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more
Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance
When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to rea … ⌘ Read more
Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute
Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications… ⌘ Read more
VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more
Intel Kernel Graphics Driver Brings Panel Replay Tunneling For Linux 7.2
Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer… ⌘ Read more
Intel Drivers With Mesa 26.2 Ready For Xe’s Support In Linux 7.1 To Better Handle Memory
Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make … ⌘ Read more
Mesa Begins Seeing Patch Activity For AMD GFX12.1 Graphics
Since last November we’ve begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1-rc2 Bringing Some More Improvements/Fixes For Older AMD GPUs
Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week’s batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes… ⌘ Read more
AMD Posts HDMI 2.1 FRL Patches For Their AMDGPU Linux Driver
It’s not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link “FRL” support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions… ⌘ Read more
Mesa Developers Consider Branching Off Some Older GPU Drivers - Including AMD R300/R600
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa’s older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and man … ⌘ Read more
The Intel Lunar Lake CPU Performance Gains On Linux Over The Past Year
Recently I ran benchmarks looking at the Xe2 graphics performance gains on Intel Lunar Lake over the past year with what’s shipped by Ubuntu and comparing against our original tests of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. With those Lunar Lake iGPU benchmarks out of the way, here is a look at how the Lunar Lake CPU performance has evolved on Linux since April 2025. ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance
The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It’s a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at … ⌘ Read more
AMD VPE 2.0 Support Merged For Mesa 26.2
Merged overnight to the latest Mesa graphics driver development code is enabling the VPE 2.0 engine to be found with future AMD Radeon GPUs… ⌘ Read more
LACT 0.9 Released With UI Updates, Voltage-Frequency Curve Editor For NVIDIA
LACT, one of the leading open-source solutions to provide a graphics card management GUI that works across AMD / NVIDIA / Intel graphics hardware on Linux, is out with a major update this weekend… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.7 Enables Overlay Planes For Intel Graphics, More Performance/Efficiency
KDE developers continued to land more feature changes for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. It’s a busy spring of fixes, optimizations, and shiny new features for Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more
@kiwu@twtxt.net Working on my game Frontier Crown – Going to push a new version today hopefully that includes much improved graphics, expanded ruleset and scope.
HDMI FRL Support Achieved With Open-Source Nouveau For NVIDIA GPUs
While the AMDGPU open-source driver has struggled with HDMI 2.1 support due to the HDMI Forum blocking open-source implementations, HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) as a feature of the HDMI 2.1 specification is enjoying success now with the open-source Nouveau graphics driver on Linux for NVIDIA GPUs… ⌘ Read more
Intel LLM-Scaler vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 Released With Official Arc Pro B70 Support
As part of Intel’s LLM-Scaler initiative for AI inferencing on Intel Arc hardware, out today is their vllm-0.14.0-b8.2 update that includes officially supporting the Arc Pro B70 graphics card… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1 Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Merged With Intel & AMD Leading The Way
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it’s the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable… ⌘ Read more
Valve Developer Further Improves Old AMD GPUs: HD 7870 XT Finally Working On Linux
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements … ⌘ Read more
As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.
This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.
So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…
Architecture slop:
- find a sketch of what an old building looked like
- generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
- generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building
Moralizing slop:
History slop:
Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Linux Graphics Performance Up ~17% Over Past Year
Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it’s been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year. ⌘ Read more
Valve Developer Lands RADV/ACO Changes For AMD’s GFX11.7 / RDNA 4m
The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD’s GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as “RDNA 4m”… ⌘ Read more
AMD Linux Graphics Driver Introducing “Power Module” To Better Match Windows Behavior
With the set of today’s AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a “power module” that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features… ⌘ Read more
Intel Arc Pro B70 Open-Source Linux Performance Against NVIDIA RTX & AMD Radeon AI PRO
Last week after receiving the Intel Arc Pro B70 review hardware I began with some benchmarks looking at how the Arc Pro B70 compared to existing Intel GPUs on Linux with their fully open-source driver stack. Today’s article features the latest Arc Pro B70 benchmarks under Linux in looking at how the performance and value compares to other NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon (AI) PRO workstation graphics cards in the lab. ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 26.04 Delivers Great Performance Improvements For AMD Strix Point, Especially For RDNA 3.5 Graphics
As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the … ⌘ Read more
GreenBoost Memory Orchestrator For NVIDIA GPUs Introduces GreenBoost-Proton For Gaming
Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has … ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.1 RadeonSI Driver Lands Improvement For AMD APUs With Rusticl
For those wishing to make use of modern OpenCL 3.0 capabilities on AMD APUs/SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics using Mesa’s Rusticl driver, an improvement was merged this weekend to the RadeonSI driver ahead of this quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release… ⌘ Read more
Support For AMD GFX11.7 “RDNA 4m” Pending For RADV & RadeonSI Drivers
Back in February we were the first to report on a new AMD “RDNA 4m” target appearing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. While part of the “RDNA 4” family, it’s graphics IP version is GFX 11.7 (GFX1170) that is associated with the RDNA 3 family but with some ISA changes to align it slightly more with the newer RDNA 4 graphics IP. While the RDNA 4m AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler patches have been out for two months, the Mesa patches have only been … ⌘ Read more
Valve Developer Improves The Linux Gaming Experience For Limited vRAM Hardware
Natalie Vock of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team primarily working on the RADV Vulkan driver has come up with a new interesting creation: patches to the Linux kernel and KDE for sharply improving the gaming experience for those running systems with limited amounts of video memory. Such as for graphics cards with just 8GB of dedicated vRAM, the patches now available – initially on CachyOS for a nice out-of-the-box experience – p … ⌘ Read more
Intel Arc Pro B70 Benchmarks With LLM / AI, OpenCL, OpenGL & Vulkan
Last month Intel announced the Arc Pro B70 with 32GB of GDDR6 video memory for this long-awaited Battlemage G31 graphics card. This new top-end Battlemage graphics card with 32 Xe cores and 32GB of GDDR6 video memory offers a lot of potential for LLM/AI and other use cases, especially when running multiple Arc Pro B70s. Last week Intel sent over four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards for Linux testing at Phoronix. Given the current re-testing for the i … ⌘ Read more
Jay: A New Open-Source Shader Compiler Being Developed For Intel GPUs
Jay is a new open-source shader compiler being developed for Intel’s open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers. Ultimately this Jay shader compiler should help in delivering better Linux graphics performance with modern Intel hardware… ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 26.04 Provides More Performance For AMD Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo”
Last week I provided benchmarks to quantify how the AMD Strix Halo graphics performance has evolved since launch one year ago, in today’s article is a look at how the Zen 5 CPU performance with the flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 has evolved under Linux in the year since these exciting APUs began making their way to high-end laptops and desktops. Complementing the nice Radeon 8060S performance gains are also some nice CPU performance benefits q … ⌘ Read more
Mesa Granted Permanent Updates Exception For Fedora Linux
It doesn’t change too much in practice with how Mesa updates typically have been handled under Fedora Linux, but now it’s officially documented: Mesa graphics drivers have a permanent updates exception so new Mesa versions can be shipped as updates in Fedora stable releases… ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD Aims To Better Track Laptop Hardware That Works Or Doesn’t For Their OS
Over the past year the FreeBSD project has been making much progress on making it more viable to run this BSD operating system on laptop hardware. They have worked on better graphics driver support, improved power management / suspend, making sure audio is working, and even rolling out a KDE desktop option from the FreeBSD OS installer to ease the deployment on desktops. While that engineering work continues, they are also working now to … ⌘ Read more
AMDGPU Driver Ready To Be The Default For Aging Kaveri / Kabini / Mullins APUs
With Linux 6.19 AMD GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.1 dGPUs now default to the AMDGPU driver rather than the legacy Radeon Linux driver. For these Southern Islands and Sea Islands graphics cards it means much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improved functionality in using this modern AMDGPU kernel graphics driver on Linux. One of the exceptions has been the GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri still defaulting to the older R … ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD Laptop Project Hopes To Port Newer Linux Graphics Drivers This Year
Developers working on the FreeBSD laptop initiative to make the FreeBSD operating system more suitable for running on modern laptop hardware have drafted their road-map of further action items they hope to accomplish in 2026… ⌘ Read more
Snapdragon X2’s Adreno X2-85 GPU Sees Driver Improvements For Linux 7.1
Rob Clark on Thursday sent out the batch of MSM DRM driver feature changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window. This new work for DRM-Next includes enhancements to the Adreno X2-85 GPU support as found within the new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs plus various enhancements to existing Qualcomm graphics/display hardware… ⌘ Read more
Vulkan 1.4.348 Ships Four New Extensions - Including One To Help OpenGL Emulation
Vulkan 1.4.348 released this morning as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.348 comes four new extensions… ⌘ Read more