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For those still using old AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" or GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards, the upcoming [2]Linux 6.19 kernel is a wonderful holiday gift. With Linux 6.19, [3]the GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are now defaulting to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver in place of the legacy "Radeon" DRM driver that has been the default for GCN 1.1/1.0 and other ATI/AMD graphics processors of the past 2+ decades. In this article is a look at the performance benefit of now AMDGPU being the default as well as now enabling RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box.

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The past number of years has allowed switching over to AMDGPU in place of the Radeon driver for GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards via setting kernel module parameters. But only this year [5]thanks to work by Valve for improving these Radeon HD 7000/8000 and Rx 200 series support is feature parity reached when using the AMDGPU driver and thus AMD allowing the default driver switch to be made.

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So for those on old GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs and haven't manually switched over to using the AMDGPU driver, you will be in for a nice improvement when upgrading to Linux 6.19+. The AMDGPU driver is actively improved upon and supported with this kernel driver supporting up through the latest CDNA and RDNA4 graphics processors. AMDGPU has better performance than the classic Radeon driver, RADV Vulkan driver support is only implemented for the AMDGPU kernel driver (thus now working Vulkan out-of-the-box for these old AMD GPUs), and just all-around a better move now that these old AMD graphics processors have feature parity.

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Today's testing is looking at AMDGPU vs. Radeon driver performance now with Linux 6.19. [8]The last time I had looked at AMDGPU vs. Radeon kernel driver performance was back in 2019 and other tests more than a half-decade old. Frankly without the improvements contributed by Valve's Timur Kristóf this year for GCN 1.0/1.1 AMDGPU feature parity, these old AMD GPUs would have likely rotted away on the Radeon driver and never transitioned to AMDGPU by default.

For this fresh AMDGPU vs. Radeon driver testing, I dusted off a Radeon HD 7950 graphics card for the kernel driver comparison. Mesa 26.0-devel as of last week (Mesa ACO PPA for reproducibility) was used for the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV driver for all testing atop an Ubuntu 25.10 host. The Radeon HD 7950 was tested with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D test box.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-619-amdgpu-radeon&image=linux_619_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.19

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-AMDGPU-GCN-1.0-1.1

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-619-amdgpu-radeon&image=linux_619_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-619-amdgpu-radeon&image=linux_619_radeon_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-619-amdgpu-radeon&image=linux_619_amdgpu_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amdgpu-radeon-linux50

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-619-amdgpu-radeon&image=linux_619_3_lrg