On old AMD GPU support. Radeon vs AMDgpu

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

I made this page with the sole intent to clarify names and their definitions.

It’s hard to learn things when there isn’t even a monolithic, short summary of what one has to learn.^[1]

I also made this page to better understand and deal with the problems of a PC of mine with GCN 3 graphics (which I often can’t work on for personal health reasons).^[2]

---

So,

MESA drivers and AMD GPUs support:

Long AMD GPUs’ family story short:

• There was Terascale architectures up to 2012 circa, then 2012-2019 there was GCN 1 to 5, then onwards RDNA 1 to [ongoing].

• ^[3]Through the years “Radeon [or ATI]” was the Linux driver up to the “early” GCN cards (1.0 and 1.1, 1 and 2), and “amdgpu” was the one for newer GCN and RDNA ones.

Thanks to my previous issue I have been able to learn that these Linux’ drivers for AMD GPUs have problems with older cards.
While all RDNA is basically plug-&-play^[4], ATI drivers don’t support Vulkan, and amdgpu has problems with GCN 1-3.

---

GCN 1 to 5 seemed to, more or less, support amdgpu with Analog Output (VGA) off^[5], and therefore amdgpu is turned off by default on most of them (GPUs and iGPUs), requiring manual activation from the user.
There may have been other problems through the years, but mine is that Fedora KDE uses Wayland, and Wayland uses Vulkan.

.

In my issue I had a AMD A10-7870K with GCN 3 (1.2) graphics called “Godavari” (“Kaveri” refresh).
By these wikis it should have been covered by amdgpu, but it functionally wasn’t since MESA 25 (read those posts for more info) and other users said that “it should not be covered by default” (no citations, but it functionally was/is a fact…).
This is what I had to do to “fix” the problem starting from a fresh install, so that I would be sure that there was nothing I previously did that could have “ruined” my Distro.

This means that GCN 1 to 3 need amdgpu to be manually activated.

AMD A10-7870K Specs

---

---

---

With that said, I don’t think there’s much more to say…

• Distros with Xorg don’t need amdgpu, but ATI can’t use Vulkan, and therefore DXVK^[6]. This makes them able to be used as “desktop GPUs” (working with basic software, and browsing the interwebssss) but almost useless for gaming, especially with anything non-native and which uses Vulkan natively.

• Both I haven’t tested my PC enough to get accurate benchmarks^[7] and there really aren’t many such benchmarks online, so I can’t really say how much “performance is lost compared to Windows 10”, for whoever may care for such data.

• If anything needs to be corrected, let me know, and I’ll edit the page.

---

1. There either are old pages with old info, newer pages which are basically blogs, or pages so condensed for those who already know what they are looking for that are useless for normal people. Me myself had no idea where to look for the radeon/ATI and amdgpu wiki pages up until now, while I am writing this post… ↩︎

2. With limited free time to actually live I have to choose what to spend it on, without having burn my privacy away, and purely spending it on PC problems and such isn’t the greatest of choices… ↩︎

3. This stuff is about the past, we gotta focus on recent history, so this is a tl;dr . ↩︎

4. Newer GPUs will ALWAYS require around 1 year of work from Devs for the MESA driver to be as performant as on Windows. ↩︎

5. More old data about the past, believe it or not this page is 5 years old. ↩︎

6. It’s more complex than this, “it” can use OpenGL/ToGL for things, but it’s not important in this context… ↩︎

7. From the few I managed to run is basically the same, but the difference of 10 to 30 FPS hits differently if you are (on W10) at 100fps or at 40… ↩︎

[Espionage724]

@isaac0clarke

Distros with Xorg don’t need amdgpu, but ATI can’t use Vulkan, and therefore DXVK[6]. This makes them able to be used as “desktop GPUs” (working with basic software, and browsing the interwebssss) but almost useless for gaming, especially with anything non-native and which uses Vulkan natively.

I used R600 GPUs for a StepMania machine and preferred radeon over modesetting and amdgpu for native EAX/2D acceleration (latter two do glamor/2D → 3D); iirc radeon had additional options for disabling Vsync/Flip/swap too.

With Xorg I prefer hardware-specific DDX over modesetting (intel iirc reports different multithreading and CPU instructions vs nothing modesetting); and on UHD 630 glxgears is 7K modesetting vs over 9K intel.

---

I also suspect modesetting does something with latency or font rendering; I switched from weeks of intel to it on a whim one day and had immediate eye-strain like something wasn’t right.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

Hum… interesting.
So that’s another reason to chose radeon instead of ATI on older hardware:

2D games (basically).

Btw could you edit your message to put some sources in there?
I have no idea what modesetting, 7k and alike mean.
“glxgears” is an OpenGL demo with 3D, solid-color gears, but except brand names I don’t recognize the rest.

[isaac0clarke (Isaac Clarke)]

Here’s a minor update:

I managed to test an R7 240 (4gb DDR3)'s VGA output on the LATEST non-beta version of Fedora KDE.

I got an output, a stable and clean one, even with the amdgpu driver, using the VGA output and Vulkan rendering stuff (for KDE on Wayland).
I didn’t use it much and bothered only to test just a couple of games^[1] like Super Tux Kart, Quake Remaster, ULTRAKILL and Counter Strike: Source, of the latter which I have taken these photos:

(The Linux performance, even with the 4gb DDR3 model, seems to at best reach 1/3 the one of the GT 1030. It COULD be a decent GPU for older games, but the older version of Vulkan, the fact that it’s overall weaker, and that you’ll most probably only find it used, will mean that it may not be a good choice, even at €10. The GT 1030 is already barely enough to run games like DOOM 2016 at its lowest at 720p native. The R7 240 just can’t.)

---

---

^[2]

This means that as of the date 28th of march 2026 a GCN 1.0 GPU can run the amdgpu driver instead of the Radeon (or radeonsi or ATI) driver inside of the MESA driver.

---

1. which use Vulkan ↩︎

2. I have to spell it out for Google’s worms to ACTUALLY catch it!!! ↩︎