AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPU teased again as 'GFX12' in new Linux patches

AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture has popped up with recent patches for Linux again, with the company adding patches for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler.

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Previously, AMD didn't push into Linux as hard as their competitors like Intel and NVIDIA, with the new patches not offering anything overly exciting, but instead, it's just traditional instructions support, updating existing hardware registers, and a bunch of pull requests for "GFX12".

We don't know anything more about RDNA 4 than we did yesterday, but what's interesting here is that AMD is forming its graphics driver for Linux with early support for its next-gen GPU architecture. Wccftech ponders that AMD is going to have increased competition to open-source alternatives including MESA's Vulkan driver. AMD could have improved support for next-gen architectures from here on out, even though RDNA 4 is most likely at least a year away.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture will form the Radeon RX 8000 series desktop GPU family, which we've heard might top out with the likes of the Radeon RX 8800 XT... something that won't compete against NVIDIA's next-gen Blackwell GPU-powered GeForce RTX 5090.

• Read more: AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 'Navi 44' and 'Navi 48' GPUs appear in Linux
• Read more: AMD's next-next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs confirmed for 2024 on 'advanced node'

AMD hasn't been able to touch NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce RTX 4090... and I truly doubt we'll see RDNA 4 topple the RTX 4090, let alone whatever NVIDIA is cooking for its next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.

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Here's what we've heard from previous leaks on AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPUs:

• Navi 48: 32 WGP + 48MB of Infinity Cache + GDDR7 memory + 192-bit memory bus + PCIe 5.0 x16
• Navi 44: 20 WGP + 32MB of Infinity Cache + GDDR7 memory + 128-bit memory bus + PCIe 5.0 x8

Another configuration would have:

• Navi 48: 32 WGP + 32MB of Infinity Cache + GDDR7 memory + 128-bit memory bus + PCIe 5.0 x8
• Navi 44: 20 WGP + 24MB of Infinity Cache + GDDR7 memory + 96-bit memory bus + PCIe 5.0 x8