The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

	The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux(phoronix.com)
	491 points by speckx 10 days ago \| 104 comments
	tl;dr: Valve's Timur Kristóf has spent the past year improving AMDGPU kernel driver support for old GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs, enabling them to migrate off the legacy Radeon driver and gain access to RADV Vulkan, better performance (~30% in Linux 6.19), and improved power management. His work—covered in an XDC2026 talk—fills a gap left by AMD, which has largely stopped investing in these aging cards, making them viable for Linux gaming in 2026 and beyond.
	HN Discussion: ↑Personal experience confirms Linux on AMD GPUs performs exceptionally well, validating the work's impact ↑Criticism of AMD for not maintaining their own older hardware, leaving the work to Valve ↑Older GPUs have many practical uses beyond gaming, making driver improvements valuable •Hope that this driver/compiler work could extend to benefit LLM inference on old GPUs ↑Excitement about potential for fixing bugs and reverse-engineering firmware blobs in old hardware