AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT Linux Performance
Last month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT graphics cards while today these graphics cards go on sale for $449 and $499 USD, respectively. Today also marks the review embargo lift so I'm now able to talk about the Linux support and performance for these new RDNA3 graphics cards that are designed for 1440p gaming,
As a reminder, the Radeon RX 7700 XT pricing starts out at $449 USD for this graphics card that has 54 RDNA3 compute units, 54 RT accelerators, 12GB of GDDR6 video memory on a 192-bit interface, a 2171MHz game clock, and 48MB 2nd gen Infinity Cache all while having a 245 Watt board power. The Radeon RX 7800 XT meanwhile starts out at $499 USD and has a slightly higher board power at 263 Watts but has 60 RDNA3 compute units, 60 RT accelerators, 16GB of GDDR6 video memory on a 256-bit interface, a 2124MHz game clock, and 64MB 2nd gen Infinity Cache.
The Radeon RX 7700 Xt / RX 7800 XT graphics cards continue to have all the common RDNA3 GPU features like DisplayPort 2.1 connectivity and AV1 hardware encoding. These new products fit in between the RX 7600 that launched this summer and the RX 7900 series that debuted last November.
It shouldn't come as too much surprise given the other Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards being well supported under Linux and the time that RDNA3 graphics processors have been around now, but the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT do run nicely on Linux with modern distributions (or at least recent Linux kernel and Mesa versions).
For those currently running Ubuntu 23.04, enabling the RX 7700 XT / RX 7800 XT support means just needing to run a newer Linux kernel version and also updating the AMDGPU firmware files from linux-firmware.git. AMD recommends Linux 6.4 and newer while the latest Linux 6.3 point releases work out too. Switching to a newer Mesa version isn't required compared to what Ubuntu 23.04 ships but it's generally recommended to use Mesa Git or the latest upstream release for the best RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan performance. For those on Fedora 38, simply installing all available system updates will get you going with the necessary Linux kernel and firmware requirements.
For those using Ubntu 22.04.3 LTS or other enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD will be rolling out a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver version that has the RX 7700 and RX 7800 series support.
If you are rolling your own open-source graphics driver stack, look to use Linux 6.3+ and Mesa 23.1+ for the best support. Plus ensure you are running a sufficiently new linux-firmware.git snapshot at least for the "amdgpu/" files for ensuring you have all the necessary firmware components in place. In my resting between Linux 6.3 and 6.5, the performance across those versions has been largely the same for the RX 7700/7800 XT. You'll likely find more performance out of the RDNA3 GPUs by using the latest Mesa Git state.
I've only had less than two weeks with these new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards but in all of my testing thus far they have been running well in the above configurations. Let's move on though for an initial look at the performance, power consumption / efficiency, and the performance per dollar of the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux.