AMD's initial support for its next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs & its VCN5 hardware has finally been merged into the RadeonSI OpenGL driver at Linux, marking the firm's leap into the future.
AMD Looks To Show Speediness With RDNA 4 GPU Enablement As The Firm Pushes Out Patches More Faster Than Ever, VCN5 Encode/Decode Capabilities Also Confirmed
It's been a while since we have witnessed multiple GFX12/RDNA 4 GPU developments at Linux and how Team Red enhanced their approach using "IP blocks."
Based on this readiness, we expect optimal support for next-gen GPUs at launch. Now, Phoronix reports that initial work for RDNA 4 GPU enablement has finally seen the merge with mainstream Radeon drivers on Linux, suggesting that we are indeed close to the official launch timeline and, by the looks of it, AMD is all prepared for the release.
It is disclosed that 24 patches were merged into Mesa 24.2-devel, with a majority of them dealing with the platform's fundamentals, such as AMD AC code, ADDRLIB library code for GFX12 (RDNA 4 GPU), and several other changes made to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver. Since the patches were waiting for the merge request, we didn't witness anything new or unique about them; hence, we won't go into details.
In addition to these, AMD also rolled out VCN5 (Video Codec Next) encode/decode capabilities for its RDNA 4 GPUs:
It is quite fortunate to see the approach adopted by Team Red this time with future RDNA and Zen architecture enablement at Linux since, as witnessed in the past, AMD showed huge reluctance in pushing out patches, with some even coming days after the official launch. Earlier patches also revealed brand new ray tracing capabilities for RDNA 4 GPUs, more on that here.
With such initiatives, AMD is ready to take Linux support to an all-time high, giving competition to alternatives like MESA's RADV Vulkan driver, which is seen as the far better choice & has witnessed tremendous interest over the past few years due to its more open-source nature.
News Source: Phoronix
