As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging “Radeon” kernel graphics driver over to the “AMDGPU” kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer.

Timur Kristóf over the past several months worked out analog video connector support for AMDGPU DC as one of the missing features when using GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU kernel driver. He’s also been working on other fixes and improvements for allowing the Radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs to play nicely with this driver. By going with the AMDGPU driver, these first two generation Graphics Core Next GPUs can enjoy RADV Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, better performance, and all around a more well rounded and better maintained open-source driver than using the legacy Radeon driver.