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.
I can't launch Doom 2016, Brothers or Darksiders 2 on Windows. The screen blanks, if I unplug the HDMI cable and plug it in again I do sometimes get a signal. Ofcourse it works flawless under Linux.
Who would've thought that in 2026 gaming under Linux is actually the better option. Pretty awesome to see it work so well!
My sentiments exactly, and now with the popularity of the steam deck and other Linux handhelds, every sort of new utility related to gaming seems to have first-class Linux support.
About the only issue you could possibly have is anti-cheat and even that has a fair amount of Linux support.
Not in my experience. The 16GB 9070 non-XT seems to have been released in March 2025. I purchased one in November 2025 [0]. I observed -and continue to observe- no significant difference in graphics performance between Linux and Windows. I've also not noticed any significant difference in performance with regards to raytracing, but that might be because I have the non-XT variant, and/or it might be because I run Gentoo Linux, which probably has much newer versions of both Mesa and the kernel than most Linux distributions. I CBA to test either of these theories.
[0] Mad props to Gamers Nexus for publishing the video where they speculated that the time around Thanksgiving was going to be the "low" point for graphics card prices... so if you were thinking of buying an upgrade that was THE time to do so. They were totally correct.
Yes, raytracing works and it’s performant. I don’t know about 90% of Windows 11 performance but I am
too busy enjoying games to care about benchmarks.
Just to put things into perspective, the 9070XT is the third or fourth fastest gaming graphics card money can buy depending on the game.
The 5070Ti is $300 more than the 9070XT with similar performance, the 5080 could give you a good boost but costs even more, then you’ve got the 5090 which is a completely insane and unrealistically expensive purchase.
The 5070ti used to be more closely priced against the 9070XT but the RAM crisis is driving Nvidia card costs up faster than AMD due to the difference in RAM type.
When you think about it in that context I have to ask if it even matters that the raytracing on this card in Linux is competitive when the Nvidia side gives you a lower tier card for the same dollar anyway.
Nvidia typically has more of a performance penalty in Linux than AMD as well, so that narrows the gap further.
This idea that it must have wonderfully perfect raytracing performance has to be put in this perspective. The reality is that even if raytracing is half as fast in Linux as it is in Windows you’re still raytracing much faster than the median gamer on the market. A game that runs poorly on a 9070XT doesn’t exist.
There are also still in 2026 very few games that extensively leverage raytracing and path tracing since the PlayStation and Xbox game consoles are limited in that regard. It makes very little sense for most game developers to make their games only come out looking nice with path tracing cranked up.
So I can't comment on the raytraced experience because I don't bother with the raytracing, however I found AND worked out of the box on day one multiple times now. However RT benchmarks from January show it neck and neck.
Ubuntu LTS distros can need some time, yeah. A few months is not unheard of.
AMD typically starts adding basic kernel support before the hardware comes out, but full feature support is usually shipped shortly after hardware release. I suppose it's to avoid leaking specs before release?
But anyway if you want good support for new hardware, much better to run some sort of rolling release, like most Arch based distros.
Personally I run an Ubuntu LTS but with the latest mesa drivers via ppa, and am always at least a generation behind on the card. Much cheaper that way. Or at least it used to be...
I use it for a bit of everything: dev work (InteliJ), basic 3D modeling/printing (freeCAD, Blender, Orca), light video editing (OBS, Kdenlive), gaming (wine) ...
Could probably go with an Arch based distro, but the Ubuntu/Debian base is useful for the good compatibility.
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.
> 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.
There's still a real amount of time between someone creating a patch and it going in to a final release of the kernel and then coming out even to rolling release distros. It's not years like debian but it's much longer than when consumers first get their hands on the hardware.
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.
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...
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?
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!