A Valve engineer made decade-old Radeon cards up to 30% faster on Linux

Timur Kristóf, of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team, moved old AMD graphics cards from the legacy Radeon driver to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver, and he presented that work in Toronto at XDC 2026 (Phoronix). These are GCN 1.0 and 1.1 cards from about a decade ago, and in Phoronix’s tests of Linux 6.19 on a Radeon HD 7950, the card ran up to 30% faster after the switch, with especially strong gains in older OpenGL games (Tom’s Hardware).

Linux had long relied on the aging Radeon driver for these cards (Tom’s Hardware), and moving them to AMDGPU unlocks the RADV Vulkan driver, better performance and all-around better functionality than the legacy Radeon code (Phoronix).

Kristóf addressed defects in the AMDGPU display code for these cards and various power management issues along the way, then added soft reset support and other improvements (Phoronix). In April, he put out patches to get the Radeon HD 7870 XT, a card that had never worked with the open-source Linux graphics drivers at all, working properly under Linux nearly 14 years after it first shipped (Phoronix).

An engineer on a game company’s Linux team made these old cards run better. I like that more than most of the new GPU launches I’ve watched this year.

If you’ve got an old gaming PC with a Radeon HD 7000-series card sitting in a closet (GCN 1.0 powered that series, per Tom’s Hardware), I’d put a current Linux distribution on it with kernel 6.19 or newer and see what it does with the games you already own. Phoronix says this work makes these aging cards more viable for Linux gaming in 2026 and beyond.

Good drivers can keep old hardware useful for a long time.