Early Adopter Minigame
Both the 5000 series Nvidia launch and RDNA4 are a bit rocky for early adopters for different reasons. So we have a bit of a mini game getting everything set up. Even then there are patches coming hot and fast for RADV and Mesa to solve issues and glitches.
The key things are newest kernel, 6.13.5 minimum, latest Linux firmware and mesa 25.
On arch Linux this is mesa git, vulkan Radeon git, and some manual firmware (at least on launch day though likely this shows up in the package within a day or two).
One wrinkler with kernel 6.13.5 is that it has split lock detection. It should be OFF for now because in vfio uses cases it causes performance problems, and in gaming it can cause games to be unstable.
split_lock_detect=off in your kernel config is recommended. edit: we never learn from the past: The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [LWN.net]
Glitches You Can Expect
(hang)
(crash type 1)
(cs go)
Promise of Good Perf even with ray tracing!
impressive result for 9070! XT is even better.
todo/mini how-to on arch
Ubuntu 24.10
TODo/notes
10 Likes
I just checked my Fedora 41 install and while I dont have a 9000 series card, I checked the versions of the kernel and mesa and both seems to be at the correct and up to date version (all I need is the firmware but of course without the card, I cant the get the amdgpu firmware update via fwupdmgr) does that mean Fedora Linux users would be in a good position for a simple GPU swap?
picked up an xfx swift 9070 for ÂŁ524. Will post back in a few days once it arrives as to how the setup on arch went, replacing my 5700xt so assuming the package updates have hit the main repos by then it should just be plug and play.
1 Like
Wow, from where? I was lucky to get a Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT from eBuyer for ÂŁ569.99.
It was kind of tense for a while.
Happy for you.
From scan. I saw a few XTs listed for that price but my limit was 500. Saw similar pricing at overclockers as well, though the selection was more limited
edit: wow i’m just looking back now and there’s nothing for under 600 on scan. Overclockers has a few still but the prices have gone up for sure, cards the same price as mine are now 539.
The review says coming soon. Is there a time frame for ROCm support? I’ve been playing round with an old 1060 and while it’s fast enough, I’d love to see what a modern card can do with some of the larger models.
if you’re on the bleeding edge git with rocm, they will show up in rocm-smi but I was unable to fire up pytorch and get it to do useful things without obscure errors. They’re probably “close” though.
1 Like
Wendel, are you able to clarify specially what is needed for firmware? I’m about to install it in my machine tonight. It seems like for the kernel and Mesa on Arch, the git packages or simply enabling the test repos should be enough.
I don’t see any recent updates to Linux firmware package, though.
probably linux-firmware-git from aur
im curious about undervolting and power capping because im weird that way
2 Likes
Got one of the last batch of powercolor reaper XT’s at MSRP from OCUK, should be here on Monday as in my haste to checkout I forgot to select Saturday delivery.
I’m running arch with CachyOS repo & kernel, looking forward to getting it working, should be fairly painless (famous last words!).
This is the first time I’ve bought a graphics card at launch (half an hour away from a micro center and wanted to upgrade from my 6700XT), and while it’s great that this has Linux support out of the gate, I am running into some issues with my 9070XT:
I’m in the middle of my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and while the RT performance at 1440p is great (assuming you don’t turn on Path Tracing), immediately after the benchmark loads OR after about 10 minutes in game, the compositor has to restart, and if I try launching it again without a full reboot, the whole screen gets corrupted.
I’m running Garuda Linux Dragonized (so basically Arch with a beautified KDE + a simple frontend for setting up gaming stuff)
uname -srm outputs “Linux 6.13.5-zen1-1-zen x86_64”
lspci -k -d ::03xx outputs “amdgpu” for both kernel driver and kernel modules, and my current mesa-git version is 25.0.0_devel.200442
Mostly curious if anyone else is seeing similar behavior on “cleaner” setups or if there’s some KDE grossness with the 9070XT
1 Like
not got mine yet but are you running linux-firmware-git from the AUR? The latest in the arch repos is too old.
1 Like
I’m starting to think I should not have played the early adopter minigame with an Ubuntu LTS version. This may be what finally bumps me over to Arch. I am not having a smooth time.
but new card… so nice.
Ahh i thought i might be missing something like that. I’ll give that a shot and post results here
Hi folks.
Picked one up today. After a lot of drama I won’t get into (ripping parts of my case so the dang thing fits, realizing I threw out one of the pcie cables for my power supply and having to figure out all that) Ive finally gotten around to the ol “driver” dance.
Been fighting with ChatGPT the last few hours and I’m not getting anywhere. In the the video it says to add the mainline ppa and update to the latest kernel. I installed 6.13.5 but that second part, getting mesa 25 to work has been where I am stuck. It keeps falling back to software renderer.
No hate on arch, I rather stick with Ubuntu for this. I’m on the latest release.
I aksed GPT to summarize out troubleshooting (sorry for the slop but it might shed some light on)
- Installed RX 9070 XT and new PSU, fixed boot issue by reseating RAM.
- Installed Kubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, upgraded to Kernel 6.13.5 for GPU support.
- GPU detected in lspci, but glxinfo showed LLVMpipe (software rendering) instead of RadeonSI.
- Installed official AMD drivers (
amdgpu-install), but DKMS failed on 6.13.5.
- Used
--no-dkms install, Vulkan (vkcube) started working, but OpenGL still stuck on LLVMpipe.
- Installed AMD’s latest firmware, reinstalled Mesa, and used Kisak PPA instead of Oibaf.
- Forced Mesa to use RadeonSI, but glxinfo still shows LLVMpipe.
- Neofetch detects RX 9070 XT properly, but OpenGL isn’t using GPU acceleration.
- Need Mesa 25 for proper OpenGL support without Oibaf.
- Resident Evil 2 crashes; need to confirm full GPU usage for games.
- Looking for best way to force OpenGL off LLVMpipe & confirm games use RX 9070 XT.
Anyone able to test AMD AMF encoding with bleeding edge FFmpeg once working? Is the 1080p resolution being incorrect that Tim from Hardware Unboxed mentioned fixed?
yep I was getting this too. what’s your kernel error messages? dmesg output? I got errors in ring 0. if you have split lock earnings those can be squelched and it will perform much better
mesa 25,24.10 distro upgrade is a possibility but mehhhhh
Ok so I just used whatever kernel I had (6.11) and ran the AMD blob from here https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/linux-drivers.html
sudo dpkg -i amdgpu-install_6.3.60304-1_all.deb
then
sudo amdgpu-install --usecase=graphics,opencl --vulkan=pro
After a reboot I tried some games but got some green blob flickering on Resident Evil 2 so I had to make this config file for myself (Im using KDE + x11)
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amdgpu.conf
added this:
Section “Device”
Identifier “AMD Graphics”
Driver “amdgpu”
Option “TearFree” “true”
Option “VariableRefresh” “true”
Option “DRI” “3”
EndSection
After a reboot I was able to play RE2 and Yakuza 5. RE2 got locked but I turned off RT lol. All my ps4 era games are working and thats fine for me, I can wait a month for ubuntu to do their thing for a new release.
No remorse, I rather learn something and fight for my freedom than have it work out of the box on Windows 
2 Likes
