The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

Over the past year, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team made multiple improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver to enhance support for old GCN 1.0/1.1-era graphics cards from a decade ago, so they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. AMD has not devoted much resources to these aging graphics card driver improvements in years, so Kristóf and Valve's Linux team picked up the slack to deliver a much better experience.

Kristóf initially began this AMDGPU work as a kernel driver development exercise after spending years in user-space focused on Mesa 3D driver code. He has become known for transitioning old AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards and APUs from the legacy Radeon driver over to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver, which unlocks use of the RADV Vulkan driver, better performance, and all-around better functionality than the legacy Radeon code. In the process, he had to address defects in the AMDGPU display code for these legacy graphics cards along with various power management issues and more, then went on to improve them further with soft reset support and other enhancements to make these aging cards more viable for Linux gaming in 2026 and beyond.

This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work at XDC2026, with the presentation and PDF slides included. For a sense of the impact of moving old Radeon graphics cards to AMDGPU, last year's Linux 6.19 brought a significant roughly 30% performance boost for old AMD Radeon GPUs. The presentation also covers his experiences getting involved in AMDGPU kernel driver development and other tidbits for those who may want to get involved with open-source AMD Linux kernel driver development.