The Linux gaming landscape just got a significant boost! AMD has officially released comprehensive driver support for its latest graphics cards, the Radeon RX 9060 XT and the Radeon AI PRO R9700, ensuring a smooth and powerful experience for Linux users from day one. This move solidifies AMD’s commitment to the open-source community and further enhances Linux’s appeal as a robust gaming platform.
This highly anticipated driver release, part of the Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.1 package, became available on May 21, 2025, just days after the official announcement of the new GPUs at Computex 2025. It means that Linux users won’t be left waiting to harness the full potential of these cutting-edge graphics cards.
What’s Under the Hood?
The new drivers offer official support for Mesa Vulkan and OpenGL, critical components for modern gaming and graphics rendering on Linux. This ensures that titles leveraging these APIs will run optimally, delivering excellent performance and visual fidelity.
Beyond gaming, the 25.10.1 driver package also brings ROCm 6.4.1, a key enabler for AI workloads and frameworks like Llama.cpp and JAX (inference). This is particularly significant for the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is designed with substantial AI acceleration capabilities, boasting 32GB of VRAM and a Navi 48 GPU. The drivers also include compatibility with new AI models such as Llama 3.1, Qwen 1.5, and ChatGLM 2/4, opening up new possibilities for developers and researchers on Linux.
Broad Distribution Support
AMD hasn’t limited support to a single distribution. The new drivers are readily available for a range of popular Linux distributions, including:
- Ubuntu 22.04.5 HWE
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 HWE
- RHEL 9.6
- SLES 15 SP7
This broad compatibility ensures that a wide array of Linux users can benefit from these new drivers without extensive workarounds.
The Radeon RX 9060 XT: Your Next Gaming Powerhouse
The Radeon RX 9060 XT is positioned as a powerful mid-range gaming GPU, designed to excel at 1080p gaming with ray tracing enabled. Available in both 8GB and 16GB GDDR6 variants, it’s powered by the groundbreaking RDNA 4 architecture, featuring 32 compute units (2048 stream processors), 64 AI accelerators, and 32 RT accelerators. With PCIe 5.0 support and technologies like AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) and AMD HYPR-RX, it promises ultra-smooth and responsive gameplay.
The Radeon AI PRO R9700: Pushing AI Boundaries on Linux
While the Radeon RX 9060 XT targets gamers, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 is a professional-grade GPU with a strong focus on AI and compute workloads. Its massive 32GB of VRAM and dedicated AI accelerators, coupled with robust ROCm support, make it a formidable tool for AI development, data science, and other computationally intensive tasks on the Linux platform.
A Win for the Linux Ecosystem
The immediate availability of optimized drivers for the Radeon RX 9060 XT and RX AI PRO R9700 marks a significant milestone for AMD and the Linux community. It reinforces AMD’s dedication to providing a strong hardware and software experience on open-source operating systems, making high-performance computing and cutting-edge gaming more accessible than ever for Linux enthusiasts.
Keywords: Radeon RX 9060 XT, Radeon AI PRO R9700, Linux drivers, AMD, gaming, open-source, ROCm, Ubuntu, RHEL, SLES, GPU, graphics card, RDNA 4, AI, Vulkan, OpenGL, tech blog, driver release, Linux gaming, AMDGPU
Discover more from BLUE LICORICE The Sweet Spot
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
