AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX + RX 7900 XT Linux Support & Performance
Of course, many of you are anxiously wondering how well the Radeon RX 7900 series performs against the competition under Linux. Today's article is going to be a bit limited in that regard, unfortunately. NVIDIA hasn't yet provided Phoronix with any GeForce RTX 4090/4080 review samples and their PR hasn't responded to inquiries about it. So right now I don't have any GeForce RTX 40 series access and do not know about the performance or what Linux support limitations there may be with not having already provided the hardware for Linux testing or comments about it. So possibly there are outstanding Linux driver issues and hence why I haven't been seeded yet for Linux testing?
Presumably with their R525 Linux proprietary graphics driver the RTX 40 series support is in decent shape, assuming you don't mind using proprietary drivers, but beyond that I can't yet comment on the Linux support or performance there... Hopefully I will get some hardware soon to be able to properly comment on the Linux support. Thus for now on the NVIDIA side are just the GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, and RTX 3090 graphics cards for reference.
In any event for those concerned about open-source drivers, right now it's a decision between Intel Arc Graphics and AMD Radeon graphics. NVIDIA is working on their Open GPU Kernel Driver but their user-space OpenGL/Vulkan driver components remain closed-source. The Nouveau project is working on making use of NVIDIA's GPU System Processor (GSP) to help work through their long-standing re-clocking limitations and other challenges. However, there the effort is still a work-in-progress and there still isn't any code mainlined -- nor any RTX 40 open-source support in the mainline kernel at all yet. Nouveau's Vulkan effort also remains in the early stages with NVK. So for now AMD is still clearly leading when it comes to the open-source driver support or lower down the stack where Intel Arc Graphics come into play their open-source driver is maturing nicely and now with Linux 6.2 is treating DG2/Alchemist GPUs as stable.
When it comes to the Radeon RX 6900 series, unfortunately, AMD never seeded any to Phoronix for testing. At first they had a shortage of review samples but then never ended up sending over any RX 6900 series card. Thus for prior generation comparison points are the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT. Additionally, for those with an older Radeon graphics driver on the open-source stack I also re-tested the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon VII cards too.
All of the Radeon testing was done on the latest open-source driver code. Tests from the AMD packaged driver and ROCm/HIP compute tests will come in follow-up articles due to losing several days of pre-launch testing while working through the Zen 4 system problem.