Comment by LaurensBER
1 day ago
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!
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 (!)
Those are pretty old but Im sure there are reasons. Valve has access to specs from their consumers through steam so maybe a large segment of the third world uses old GPUs for gaming.
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.
> those changes have flowed through to your distro so you aren’t waiting on kernel updates
Unless you insist on running a server distro that's consistently obsolete by design (and if the notion of GPU comes into picture, that definitely shouldn't be the case), it shouldn't matter in practice. Every reputable desktop distro has a kernel/mesa stack that's up to date.
It still takes a few years for other people to find and patch the bugs.
~3 year old hardware seems to be optimal for linux in my experience. Ideally a thinkpad or something lots of linux devs have.
Buy newer and you'll be constantly finding bugs and having to apply workarounds, custom kernel builds, custom config lines, etc. just to make basic features work like the ability to adjust screen brightness.
Don't buy anything ARM or requiring a custom bootloader - thats a constant battle with custom builds needed of nearly everything.
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I would also add don't use an LTS variant (or anything based on an LTS variant) of those desktop distros
I've switched my gaming PC last year to Linux and it's been flawless.
Originally ran a 3070 which matches your "older mid tier" description and then upgraded to a 9070XT maybe 6 months after launch so not so old or mid-tier.
This used to be the case, but new AMD cards were fine about 2 weeks after they released, provided you’re not on an old kernel of course.
I can attest to this myself, my 9070 was a bit rough on launch but worked perfectly soon after.
I would say my 9070XT works better in Linux than it does in Windows.
I actually switched off Windows in a last-ditch attempt to get Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to stop crashing. To my surprise, it worked.
Never going back to Windows.
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I bought a 9070 xt shortly after launch and it was already fine, but I am on arch so had easy access to latest kernel.
Fine is not good enough. New amd cards need a year. Is raytracing fully working (min 90% of the win11 performance) these days?
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I switched to Bazzite about 3 weeks ago and am amazed at how well everything "just works". Steam and Battlenet games all running. Nvidia 5070, AMD Rizen 7800x3d, recent gigabyte motherboard.
Steam Deck amazes me, I've had it for years and it doesn't feel dated in the slightest.
It came out in 2022 and it's merely 2026 now. It's a fresh device, it has no reason to feel dated yet.
I'm running my 9070XT on NixOS and it's working great. I have Steam + Blizzard games running.
My gaming PC has a 9070 non-XT, runs Linux, and runs all but a small handful of games [0] just fine. I suspect you'll be happy with the switch.
I run games both new and old and one of my favorite guilty pleasures is looking at the Steam forum for a four, eight, or ten year old game that I've started playing because it has recently become popular again and reading the complaints from Windows users about how a driver update screwed up the game... whether because of glitchy or incorrect graphics or unavoidable crashes. Meanwhile, I'm cruising along on Proton with zero issues. :smug-face:
[0] ...that small handful includes those that go out of their way to be incompatible with Proton...
The 9070 (XT) is great on Linux if you're happy to give up RT. It works but there is a significant perf gap vs Windows.
I haven't noticed a significant raytracing performance gap compared to Windows. Perhaps I would see a big difference with the XT variant, or maybe it's because I'm running Gentoo Linux, which is almost always running much newer kernel and Mesa versions than nearly everyone else?
if you don't play esports game then you don't need to stick in windows anymore