Linux 6.19 delivers an unexpected gift to owners of older AMD graphics cards: a roughly 30% performance improvement, simply by upgrading the kernel.
The change affects AMD GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” and GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” GPUs—the Radeon HD 7000 series, HD 8000 series, and R7/R9 200 series cards released between 2012 and 2014. Starting with Linux 6.19, these GPUs will default to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver instead of the legacy “Radeon” driver that has been the default for over two decades.
The Numbers
According to Phoronix benchmarks published on December 22, 2025, testing a Radeon HD 7950 showed:
- 30% average improvement across OpenGL tests when comparing AMDGPU to the legacy Radeon driver
- Individual game benchmarks ranged from 20% to nearly 50% improvement depending on the title and settings
- The geometric mean of all test results: AMDGPU scored 234.21 versus Radeon’s 179.42
More Than Just Speed
The driver switch also enables RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box. The legacy Radeon driver never supported Vulkan, meaning these older GPUs couldn’t run Vulkan-based games or use Steam Play (Proton) effectively. With AMDGPU as the default, Vulkan now works without manual configuration.
Why Now?
The AMDGPU driver has technically supported these older GPUs for years, but required manual kernel parameter configuration. The switch to making it the default happened because of work by Valve’s Timur Kristóf, who achieved feature parity for GCN 1.0/1.1 support in the AMDGPU driver this year.
As the Phoronix article notes, without this work from Valve, these older GPUs would likely have remained on the legacy Radeon driver indefinitely. The Radeon driver receives only maintenance fixes at this point, while AMDGPU is actively developed and supports everything from these decade-old cards to the latest RDNA4 GPUs.
What This Means
For anyone still running a Radeon HD 7000/8000 or R7/R9 200 series card on Linux, upgrading to kernel 6.19 (when released) will provide:
- ~30% better OpenGL performance with no configuration changes
- Working Vulkan support for the first time
- Access to a driver that continues to receive performance improvements
The change demonstrates an often-overlooked aspect of open source graphics drivers: older hardware can gain significant performance years after purchase, rather than being left behind.
Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.19’s Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs
