Radeon Software For Linux 19.30 Brings Radeon RX 5700 Support

As a follow-up to this morning's Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux benchmarks, AMD has now published a packaged launch-day Linux driver for those wanting to use these new RDNA/Navi graphics cards on Linux without building your own kernel/Mesa/libdrm/LLVM... Well, assuming you are on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

AMD posted this "AMDGPU Navi Unified Linux driver" just minutes ago for these RX 5700 (XT) GPUs now shipping. The only change listed with this Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 version is support for the Radeon RX 5700 series.

This packaged driver with the All-Open/PRO components is nice for those not wanting to build your own open-source components in order to enjoy GPU acceleration with these brand new graphics processors. As mentioned several times now, the open-source code is in flux while it should reach the necessary stable versions by September and be integrated into the autumn Linux distribution updates like Ubuntu 19.10 and Fedora Workstation 31 for then having easy out-of-the-box support. We're also still waiting on RADV/AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support to be published.

The main downside to this packaged driver for Navi on Linux is that it just supports Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Those using Ubuntu 19.04 or other distributions will need to resort to building your own open-source driver stack or otherwise wrangling together a working packaged driver setup with some maneuvering.

Those interested in this Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS driver for the Radeon RX 5700 series can find it at AMD.com. I'll have some benchmarks of this launch-day driver out soon, but don't get too excited as given the time it takes them to build and test these packaged drivers, this driver build is likely missing those brand new RadeonSI Navi optimizations.

Now if you didn't already see it, check out today's initial Radeon RX 5700 / 5700XT Linux gaming benchmarks.