Astro Hacker News - The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

LaurensBER |next [-]

I just bought a used Ayaneo 2 handheld, it has an old(er) mobile RDNA 2 GPU and I was blown away by how well this thing performed under Linux. Almost everything (that's not a recent AAA game) runs beautiful and a lot faster/smoother than it does under Windows. The experience has been so good that I'm considering switching my main pc (with a 9070XT) to Linux as well.

No doubt Timur contributed heavily to this given Valves Steamdeck (which uses a very similar but slower GPU).

Given the current hardware prices it's pretty awesome to see someone squeezing maximum performance out of old hardware!

Gigachad |root |parent |next [-]

My experience has been that for Linux you are always better buying older mid tier hardware because all of the issues and optimisations have already been worked out and those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates.

fwipsy |root |parent |previous [-]

I'm sure Valve probably still deserves the credit, since the Steam Deck uses a RDNA 2 gpu, but the article mentions that Timur specifically worked on gcn1.0 GPUs - e.g. radeon HD 7800/7900 from 2012 (!)

wewewedxfgdf |next |previous [-]

If only AMD did this.

Waterluvian |root |parent [-]

Is there financial incentive for them to bother?

segmondy |previous [-]

I wonder if some of these could carry over for LLM inference. It will be nice to turn more ewaste GPUs into capable processing units for LLM.