AMD’s quietly decisive move this year wasn’t a new GPU at all but a software handoff: the company stopped developing its AMDVLK Vulkan driver in May 2025 and placed its bets squarely on RADV, the open‑source Vulkan driver inside Mesa. That’s the backdrop for a set of end‑of‑year benchmarks that show more than just tidy numbers — they show a change in how Linux graphics on Radeon cards will be maintained and optimized going forward.
Two drivers, one final showdown
Mike Larabel’s final apples‑to‑apples tests contrasted AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 (the last official AMD release) with the bleeding‑edge RADV in Mesa 26.0‑devel. The hardware in play included the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT — among the last models AMDVLK supported — plus earlier RX 7900 XTX data for historical comparison. Test rigs varied: one set ran on a Ryzen 9 9950X3D with Ubuntu 25.10 and Linux 6.18, another on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K with Ubuntu 24.10 and earlier kernels. The point was to compare the two drivers under realistic, modern stacks.
If you like graphs, the short story is: RADV closed the gap where it mattered most. In many traditional Vulkan graphics and compute workloads RADV matched or exceeded AMDVLK, and the most striking gains came in Vulkan ray‑tracing — once AMDVLK’s last performance stronghold.
Ray tracing: RADV grew up fast
Throughout 2025 RADV benefited from focused effort by Valve and other open‑source contributors. Improvements to the ACO compiler back end and targeted shader/RT pipeline work yielded significant performance boosts for Vulkan RT on RDNA4 hardware. Benchmarks show RADV moving from behind to near parity with AMDVLK in many ray‑traced scenes on the RX 9070 family, removing the old argument that you needed AMDVLK for decent RT performance on Linux.
That doesn’t rewrite the entire market: when you compare AMD’s RADV results to NVIDIA’s Blackwell series using their mature open drivers—particularly for RT—NVIDIA still holds a measurable lead in raw Vulkan ray‑tracing throughput. Phoronix’s cross‑vendor tests using Quake II RTX and custom Vulkan RT benchmarks illustrate that Blackwell hardware remains the fastest RT option on Linux when drivers are equal.
More than speed: maintenance and community momentum
Dropping AMDVLK wasn’t purely about relative FPS. It simplifies the maintenance story: one well‑resourced open driver (RADV) backed by engineering from Valve, AMD contributors, and the wider Mesa community means fewer duplicate efforts and faster upstream fixes. For Linux gamers and workstation users that’s useful: improvements go into Mesa, shared across distros and hardware generations.
Consolidation also helps niche platforms and projects that rely on the same stack. For example, handheld and lightweight Linux gaming scenarios benefit from fewer divergent drivers and smoother distribution packaging — something the Steam Deck community has cared about for power and usability features like low‑power download modes Steam Deck Gains Long‑Requested ‘Display‑Off’ Low‑Power Download Mode. And for cross‑platform performance comparisons and AI/compute workloads, having someone push RADV forward in Mesa makes it easier for other open drivers to learn and adapt (even if competitors’ hardware, like NVIDIA’s, still sets higher RT bars in some tests).
Where AMDVLK still matters — historically and in testing
AMDVLK’s final release remains a useful reference point. The driver’s mature codebase represents years of AMD‑specific tuning; having it as a baseline helped highlight how much RADV improved in 2025. Larabel’s compute and graphics tests show that in many non‑RT workloads RADV was already competitive earlier in the year; the big delta that closed later was ray‑tracing.
For users who want the nitty‑gritty: RADV’s gains were measured across a broad slate of Vulkan graphics, ray‑tracing, and compute benchmarks. Results differ by GPU, scene complexity, and kernel/driver combinations — but the trend was consistent: RADV’s RT improvements erased the practical advantage AMDVLK once offered.
What this means for Linux gamers and developers
- Consolidation reduces fragmentation. Fewer driver branches makes packaging, testing, and long‑term support simpler for distributions and OEMs.
- Open‑source progress is now the primary path for Radeon Vulkan tuning. That increases transparency and the chance for rapid community fixes, but it also means RADV’s development priorities will shape user experiences going forward.
- NVIDIA’s hardware still pulls ahead for Vulkan ray tracing in many benchmarks; if raw RT performance is your obsession, the hardware choice still matters.
Expect to see more RADV improvements land in Mesa during 2026 as the community builds on the momentum from 2025. That will be important not just for desktop gamers but also for Linux‑centric game ports, cloud streaming clients, and other platforms where consistent open drivers help deliver better performance and features — a dynamic echoed in other areas of gaming infrastructure like console streaming services and cloud client updates PlayStation Portal Can Now Stream Your PS5 Library — Major Cloud Update Arrives.
RADV’s 2025 leap didn’t just equalize numbers in benchmark charts. It closed the practical gap that once forced Linux enthusiasts to juggle a proprietary alternative. For anyone tracking Linux GPU support, that’s a quiet, useful victory: fewer moving parts, faster upstream fixes, and a clearer route for future optimizations — even if the RT crown still sits with NVIDIA in many workloads.