AMD confused the gaming community greatly after it announced it would put RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 driver support in “maintenance mode”, but later corrected that the two architectures would still be receiving game optimizations regardless. Apparently, this confusion also led some people to believe game optimizations would also stop on AMD’s Linux drivers as well. Luckily, Phoronix has published an article reaffirming that Linux support has not changed with this announcement, primarily because Linux AMD drivers are developed separately from their Windows counterparts.
Linux driver support is maintained very differently on AMD GPU drivers compared to AMD’s GPU drivers for Windows. Linux driver support for AMD GPUs typically dwarfs what AMD supports officially in Windows. Kernel driver support reportedly dates back all the way to AMD’s GCN 1.2 architecture, which includes GPUs such as the R9 390X and R9 Fury X.
Helping matters is that AMD GPU driver support in Linux is heavily reliant on open-source drivers. Up until September this year, the AMDVLK driver was the official open-source Linux driver from AMD and was maintained by AMD directly. Community contributions are also implemented to help improve the driver’s functionality.
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There is also the exclusively community-driven RADV driver that was started before AMD got into the Linux game with its own AMDVLK driver. Being exclusively community-driven, RADV is maintained completely independently of AMD and is currently the de facto GPU driver for all Radeon GPUs for Linux. RADV is a very robust and well-built driver solution that is supported by many of the industry’s tech giants, including Valve, Google, and Red Hat.