How a Valve Engineer Breathed New Life Into Old AMD GPUs on Linux

At the XDC2026 conference under way in Toronto, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team gave a talk on his work on the AMDGPU kernel driver. Over the past year he has landed a series of improvements that strengthen support for old AMD GPUs of the GCN 1.0/1.1 generation — cards from roughly a decade ago.

Moving from the legacy driver to the modern one

Kristóf's main achievement is migrating these old GCN 1.0/1.1 cards and APUs from the legacy Radeon driver to the modern AMDGPU. The switch unlocks access to the RADV Vulkan driver, improves performance, and generally makes the hardware behave far better than on the old code.

Along the way he had to fix defects in AMDGPU's display code for these legacy cards, resolve power-management issues, and more. He then went further with soft reset support and other enhancements — all to keep these aging accelerators viable for Linux gaming in 2026 and beyond.

The scale of the effect

How much the migration matters is clear from a recent example: in Linux 6.19, old AMD Radeon GPUs saw a performance boost of around 30%. AMD itself has devoted little to driver work for its aging hardware in recent years, and the Valve engineer has essentially picked up the slack.

Tellingly, Kristóf took on the kernel driver as a kind of exercise: before that he had spent years in user space, working on the Mesa 3D driver code. His talk also covers how he got involved in AMDGPU kernel development and offers pointers for anyone who might want to join the open-source AMD Linux driver effort.

Source: Phoronix