In short, the AMDGPU drivers will include older generations of AMD GPUs that were only supported by the radeon drivers previously, essentially the exact opposite of what we have seen with the discontinuation to support the 10 series of GPUs from nVidia within their latest driver update to 490.
Older chips such as the GCN 1 (Radeon HD 7000 series) and GCN 1.1 series … (e.g. Radeon R9 290) will default to the amdgpu driver instead of the legacy radeon drivers. And according to first tests, this should bring some performance improvements to these older cards.
Yeah, not at all. AMD drops card support far faster and more aggressively than nvidia. They have repeatedly dropped new driver support within a year of the cards still being on the market. nvidia is dropping support for cards from 7-10 years ago.
What it does show is the difference between open source and closed source. Since the AMD drivers are open source, other people can support them even after AMD stops.
Let’s not paint AMD as heroes here, they are guilty of just as much anti-consumer behavior as everyone else. None of these companies demonstrate much in the way of good behavior.
Also, the Arch packaging policies make this situation a bit worse than it otherwise would be on some other distros. On many distros, you would simply stay on the 580 drivers and all would be fine. You can’t do this on Arch because those drivers are not in the repos. To be 100% clear, I am not criticizing Arch here. It would be unreasonable to maintain different versions of packages on a rolling distro so they need to have such policies.
Back on topic, I just went outside and picked up a package. It was the GCN 1.0 card bought on ebay to test the Southern Islands drivers. I guess that won’t be needed anymore soon.
Oh well, on the positive side, it was only $25 delivered.
Exactly. It’s not AMD directly which enabled the support for the older GCN cards for the amdgpu driver,
as a matter of fact it has been
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team
who submitted the patch to support these older cards with the amdgpu driver instead of the radeon drivers.
In the grand scheme of things, as these are GPUs that are almost 13 years old. Those old cards weren’t really competitive with nVidia cards at the time, it’s not really ground braking news. The performance uplift might be marginal. They’re essentially outdated with very little VRAM (2~3 GiB).
The major difference is - even the nVidia open source kernel modules - still contain proprietary sources
That being said, there might be some misconception related to the “open” driver from nVidia, they’re not completely open source. The CUDA libraries, their raytracing / path tracing libraries and many other advanced features are still proprietary and not open source.
Not that it is important, but the R290 is GCN 2.0. As far as I know, there is no such thing as GCN 1.1. 2.0 was briefly called 1.1 before AMD documentation became available that showed otherwise but that was like…10 years ago.
Well they haven’t dropped the 500 series cards and they are no different than my GTX 1060 which is being dropped by nvidia. So i disagree with you on this. AMD also supports way older cards than these.
Haha…I figured I should do a quick stress test to ensure this card worked since it is old. Time spy is running at less than 10 fps. It is brutal on these eyes to watch. I had to be careful to look away.
Note to self, don’t try playing modern games on a Radeon 7850 with 2GB of VRAM.
There is no such thing as GCN 1.1 and 1.2 was my point.
I don’t understand the logic here.
An article was posted
I pointed out that the article was wrong*(In my opinion)
You then posted a different article from the same author as a counterpoint.
It seems like that author just made the same mistake twice. If you search for GCN 1.1, almost everything you find will just be people quoting those same two articles from a single person.
Either way, this is way off-topic to the original point.
* I want to be clear that the error was not material to the overall article posted.
Check in the comments, if someone call him out for it.
Were you an owner of a GCN 1.0/1.1/1.2 GPU ? Because you would know if you had one (I’m a former owner of an R9 360), searching this is useless, since most sites updated their data with the new GCN naming.
If I was not lazy, I would have search in Wikipedia edits, but I am.
edit: and about older GPUs, they’re still supported by the radeon driver (xf86-video-ati)
When I looked at the comments a couple of days ago, at least one person had.
Yes, I had an R9 290.
They were, at the time, referred to as GCN 1.1 but that wasn’t official. Once the official documentation surfaced that identified 1.2 as 3 it became clear that what we were calling 1.1 was supposed to be 2. However, that was more than 10 years ago so calling it 1.1 in late 2025 seems very odd to me.
Corporations are not your friends..