this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Meanwhile all five generations of GCN are varying levels of abandoned officially on Windows while Mesa supports AMD cards going back to GCN1, and even more recently started to enable AMDGPU support by default on GCN1 and 2.
But yeah, as for Windows having better support, GCN1-3 are long since buried officially for that OS, and Polaris and Vega have a foot in the grave at this point as they're curtailed to security updates only officially on Windows, contrasted against Mesa still actively supporting that older hardware. Also, can't emulate RT on RX 5000-series and older cards on Windows, while you can on Linux.
And yes, I'm aware of R.ID modded drivers for those older cards in Windows, but for this context, I'm only counting official driver support.
You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.
You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That's the bar for mainstream usage.
If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it's cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it's disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.
Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it's not unlocking hardware that wasn't working because it didn't have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.
Aside from lots of people still holding onto RX 580s or 590s because those can still apparently run a lot of stuff at passable quality settings, let alone the Vega 56 and 64 and even the RX 5700 and 5700 XT still being really capable on their own, and yeah, RT emulation on pre-RX 6000 cards is a Linux-exclusive feature and hasn't been implemented in Windows yet and I don't know if it ever will be.
Even GCN2 cards like the R9 390 or 390X can still hold their own once you get around the Vulkan 1.2.170 limitation, which can be easily accommodated for by using DXVK 1.10.x, as long as you're fine with the higher power draw vs. the RX 580 or 590 assuming everything is stock and you didn't undervolt them or set an artificial power cap in Corectrl, plus the RX 580 and 590 support Vulkan 1.3 and thus can run the latest version of DXVK.
Why would it be? Again, nobody cares.
The GPU makers want to sell you new GPUs, so they don't care. The game makers don't have much of an incentive to cater to whatever percent of the 10% of AMD users are stuck on ancient hardware, so it's not cost effective for them to care. The users are glad to extend the life of some devices, I'm sure, but the narrow band of software and features this enables is just going to get smaller over time as new software comes out, so as a collective the amount of caring will only go down.
Again, you are talking about edge cases. We are considering a blob of several billion devices in a rat race to sell, refresh and upgrade billions more. Linux will grow as it comes preinstalled in new devices, justifying additional support from manufacturers in a constructive loop. I'm not against it serving as a remedial OS to salvage old ewaste at all, but that's not how you turn it into a major player on desktop devices.
Oh, and for the record, I have some 6 series AMD GPUs around the house still. Even with native RT your assessment of their modern viability is... optimistic.
The older games and even going as recently as the PS4 and XB1 generation, will still be around for the foreseeable future in both official and unofficial capacities, though, with some of those previous-generation titles even having an official DRM-free release on GOG to boot.
And really, there's nothing interesting in the current generation outside of indie stuff, as far as the big AAA releases go, they largely appear to be slop this generation.
And, once again, nobody cares.
You are substituting your interests for the market. I'm happy that you're happy with what you have, but your opinion isn't relevant here.
What is relevant is what is installed in the hardware that is selling and will sell in the next few years. Nobody is shipping 5700s on prebuilts in 2026.
You want to see Linux in more systems? You get that by selling more systems with preinstalled Linux that don't give people an incentive to revert them back to Windows and by getting more people with preinstalled Windows on new systems to at least dual boot.
You and I are sunk cost. We're the residual 2% of users that were already using Linux before Valve shipped one prebuilt handheld system with that level of setup. I care about people buying the second one from Lenovo and about convincing Asus to make more of these and eventually about extending those options to tablets, prebuilts and laptops as well as handhelds.
That's how you both increase the Linux install base and add more third party support on both drivers and software. And hey, good news, you get to keep replaying Bioshock all you want forever. But you're not the priority here.