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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah AI is extremely good at reverse engineering compared to humans. It's one of those things were there's a huge amount of tedious but not super complex work. I think if you can set up a good harness for the agent it can probably write complete drivers.
The most difficult part is likely that a lot of hardware is easily brickable if you do the wrong thing, so I'm not going to let it loose on e.g. my solar inverter.. even though their software is shit and I'd love to replace it. (Don't buy QCells.)
I got a r9 285 in 2020 something while the crypto frenzy was still eating up all the gpus. It was 6 years old, got it for like 60 bucks if I remember correctly, best purchase ever, I got to play gta V at 60fps again.
Try to remember back to 2015 the graphics were not that bad. 4k performance was poor but for 1080p 60fps on pretty much anything.
Use as a dedicated GPU for encoding and decoding video.
Post processing like frame interpolation or superresolution. Use for GPGPU workloads. Run additional monitors independently. Use for GPU passthrough to virtual machines. Use as a backup GPU for troubleshooting. Use for test code without breaking the main GPU
For video decode if it supports the codec you want you're set, but video encode has definitely improved on more modern GPUs. Older GPUs work but you'll likely get worse quality for a given bitrate.
Even proprietary drivers can use Mesa. Most of Mesa is MIT-licensed.
It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux, and -as always- Nvidia ignores what everyone else is doing and does their own thing. Sometimes doing their own thing works out really well in the short run, but -long term- they always fall behind.
Yeah, Nvidia cares a lot if you are using compute (aka CUDA). If you are using their pure compute offerings, they are really top of the line on performance and tooling.
The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
They care about Linux, on their own distribution and licensing terms, NVidia even has their own distro.
Like most FOSS done by companies, what they don't care is GPL, which sadly will eventually be meaningless after boomer and Gen X devs that created the GNU movement no longer walk this plane.
There isn't a single embedded OS FOSS alternative to GNU/Linux that uses GPL, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr.
One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.
That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.
For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.
AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.
AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.
I've been having issues with kernel updates because Nvidia dropped support for my GPUs. Apparently 9 years was the threshold for their "very old card" support because Pascal is now over.
The community can't fix it because their drivers are proprietary blobs. Open source drivers are essentially useless. I'll have to stick to something like Ubuntu to keep the hardware working without fighting DKMS every update.
This is the reason my next GPU will be either AMD or Intel.
Maybe there’s a prestige angle to somewhat shame them into keeping up with nvidia. Though my sense is that they’re barely peers anymore in this space. :(
Perhaps René, the maintainer of T/2 Linux, will end up vibe coding an NVIDIA driver one of these days. He’s been reverse engineering and vibe coding a bunch of drivers for old graphics lately and live streaming everything.
Honestly, the folks writing inference drivers for Llama.cpp / GGML would sort of benefit from better compiler work like this.
In general, Valve's work has been exceptional and supplementing AMD's own ROCM/OpenCL and Vulkan team, they've gotten a lot of defaults right and people should work together with Valve to improve support for their chips.
I have a Radeon RX 6900 XT (16 GB VRAM, originally released in 2021), and it's possible to run some lightweight models to have okayish performance and quality of output, but nothing I've tried has come anywhere close to the quality even of the models I can use for free from OpenCode Zen or the free tier of Openrouter. If you want to keep everything local on the same card I have, it requires putting up with a model that's noticeably worse in virtually every metric than what you can get for free elsewhere, and the GPUs this article are talking about are three times as old as mine.
It would be awesome if someone manages to figure out how to get small enough models to fit on older cards to be viable, but I'm not optimistic that it will come without some sort of fundamental architectural innovation rather than incremental improvements, and it's not clear if and when that will happen.
I think you could replicate this with a larger model on your device.
Overall with the right quantisations for both the model and KV cache you can get a lot of mileage out of this old hardware. Speed remains the main limitation, as IIRC I was getting ~26-30tps on a 7700S.
Opencode currently has Mimo 2.6 Flash Free with 5x that context. Like I said, it's not impossible to get something usable, it's just not in the same league as what you can get without paying anything or needing to spend effort "managing" to get it working.
I'm not saying there's no benefit to using local models. My point is still the same as before: you have to be willing to sacrifice both performance and quality even when just comparing to free models that are available today.
I have no clue, and I agree that it does not seem sustainable. Either someone needs to find a magic solution to making it a lot cheaper, or a lot of companies are going to need a lot of money from somewhere that isn't clear.
With an extra 8gb of vram you could run qwen 3.8 27b pretty comfortably, which isn't quite as good as frontier models but definitely on par with free models on openrouter and whatnot.
Also you can use multiple GPUs at once, two of your GPUs could run qwen 27b very comfortably, and with great performance.
OpenRouter has Qwen 3.8 27B in its free tier right now. My point was that if a 5 year old GPU can't even compete with the free offerings, the 15 year old ones mentioned in the article aren't going to come close.
Most of these older cards are lacking the physical hardware for fp8 or other lower precisions that most quantized models use. Or the memory to run models at higher precision.
Assuming Valve funds this work, just buy their products. If possible, avoiding credit cards as the CC companies are trying to dictate policies about which games are acceptable and which aren't. I buy the occasional steam card with cash. I encourage everyone to shift a bit of their spending away from CC's in order to reduce the power of these companies to tell us how to live our own lives.
You can still buy steam gift cards at Best Buy if you're in North America, other similar retailers likely carry them in other countries. But Steam said they're shutting down the physical program at the end of the year because of scammers.
I understand the good will of the intent but... you have to understand that those driver code paths went thru massive QA over the years. On such complexe hardware, any modifications, even believed benign, can be disastrous for some/many software actually still 'in production'.
This is very risky: one guy QA over a massive amount of software with hardly a few remaining users able to report issues of with those GPUs...
Better have a slow working well tested driver, rather than a broken driver which is supposed to be faster...
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!
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.
~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.
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.
I can attest to this myself, my 9070 was a bit rough on launch but worked perfectly soon after.
https://www.techspot.com/news/110999-new-benchmarks-show-lin...
With significant improvements still incoming.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/even-more-amd-ray-trac...
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.
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...
Perhaps we will even be able to reverse firmware blobs into open source alternatives?
The most difficult part is likely that a lot of hardware is easily brickable if you do the wrong thing, so I'm not going to let it loose on e.g. my solar inverter.. even though their software is shit and I'd love to replace it. (Don't buy QCells.)
Try to remember back to 2015 the graphics were not that bad. 4k performance was poor but for 1080p 60fps on pretty much anything.
Use as a dedicated GPU for encoding and decoding video. Post processing like frame interpolation or superresolution. Use for GPGPU workloads. Run additional monitors independently. Use for GPU passthrough to virtual machines. Use as a backup GPU for troubleshooting. Use for test code without breaking the main GPU
Nvidia doesn't, and their Vulkan stack underperforms on Linux quite significantly.
It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux, and -as always- Nvidia ignores what everyone else is doing and does their own thing. Sometimes doing their own thing works out really well in the short run, but -long term- they always fall behind.
Nvidia cares a lot about Linux. Just... on their terms.
The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
Like most FOSS done by companies, what they don't care is GPL, which sadly will eventually be meaningless after boomer and Gen X devs that created the GNU movement no longer walk this plane.
There isn't a single embedded OS FOSS alternative to GNU/Linux that uses GPL, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr.
That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.
AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.
AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.
https://windowsforum.com/news/nvidia-ends-feature-support-fo...
Compare it to some other products from that time:
- AMD FX Piledriver CPUs
- Skylake i7-6700K
- iPhone 6s
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- Oculus Rift CV1
- Android 6 Marshmallow
The community can't fix it because their drivers are proprietary blobs. Open source drivers are essentially useless. I'll have to stick to something like Ubuntu to keep the hardware working without fighting DKMS every update.
This is the reason my next GPU will be either AMD or Intel.
In general, Valve's work has been exceptional and supplementing AMD's own ROCM/OpenCL and Vulkan team, they've gotten a lot of defaults right and people should work together with Valve to improve support for their chips.
It would be awesome if someone manages to figure out how to get small enough models to fit on older cards to be viable, but I'm not optimistic that it will come without some sort of fundamental architectural innovation rather than incremental improvements, and it's not clear if and when that will happen.
The other day I managed to get a context of 195k for Qwen3.5-9b Q4_K_M using a llama.cpp fork that supports TurboQuant:
https://github.com/TheTom/llama-cpp-turboquant
I think you could replicate this with a larger model on your device.
Overall with the right quantisations for both the model and KV cache you can get a lot of mileage out of this old hardware. Speed remains the main limitation, as IIRC I was getting ~26-30tps on a 7700S.
I'm not saying there's no benefit to using local models. My point is still the same as before: you have to be willing to sacrifice both performance and quality even when just comparing to free models that are available today.
How long is this runway?
Also you can use multiple GPUs at once, two of your GPUs could run qwen 27b very comfortably, and with great performance.
With AMD the best you can do in the consumer market right now is an RX 7900 XTX which is about 960 GB/s.
Is Valve funding this work in particular? How can people donate?
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/78E3-7431-1E88-AD...
+1 to buying Valve's products.
This is very risky: one guy QA over a massive amount of software with hardly a few remaining users able to report issues of with those GPUs...
Better have a slow working well tested driver, rather than a broken driver which is supposed to be faster...