AMD To Land Support For Navi 14 Into The Upcoming Mesa 19.2 Driver Stack

As a possible sign that AMD Navi 14 graphics cards could be coming sooner rather than later, support for Navi 14 is slated to be back-ported to the Mesa 19.2 release due out in a few weeks rather that entered its feature freeze earlier this month rather than waiting for next quarter's Mesa 19.3.

Mesa 19.2 should make it into the likes of Fedora 31, Ubuntu 19.10, and other autumn Linux distribution updates. Prominent AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver Marek Olšák has announced his interest in back-porting Navi 14 to Mesa 19.2 and intends to merge that code today.

The Navi 14 support isn't a trivial addition of new PCI IDs but rather requires a fair amount of work as it needed to fix-up its legacy pipeline support as well as switching transform feedback support to it. Apparently the legacy pipeline at least for now is working better than the Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) code-path due to hangs.

With looking to have Navi 14 support in Mesa 19.2 lends credibility to AMD potentially launching new graphics cards in Q4.

While Mesa 19.2 is likely to appear in the upcoming Fedora and Ubuntu releases, among others, a supported kernel for Navi 14 is not. Navi 14 support for the AMDGPU kernel driver will be added to the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel that won't see a stable release until November, putting it out of reach for Ubuntu 19.10 and won't appear in Fedora Workstation 31 until a stable release update after the fact.

It is anticipated AMD will release Navi 14 as a successor to the Radeon RX 580/590 "Polaris" and competitor to NVIDIA's GTX 1660 "Turing" series.


Mesa 19.2 should be released as stable around mid-September.