While the upcoming AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors continue to make use of RDNA2 graphics, with the Ryzen AI 300 series shipping today in notebooks there are RDNA3.5 graphics being introduced alongside the Zen 5 CPU cores and upgraded Ryzen AI XDNA2 NPU. While just an evolution of RDNA3, the initial benchmarks of RDNA3.5 graphics with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 are looking rather promising for both the raw graphics performance as well as the power efficiency. The Radeon 890M RDNA3.5 graphics are working on Linux when using a new enough software stack.
After working past a few hiccups in the initial Linux graphics driver support, the RDNA3.5 Radeon 890M graphics on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 exceeded my expectations. The upgraded graphics have shown measurable improvement to the OpenGL and Vulkan performance as well as the performance-per-Watt. And… all backed by AMD’s continued open-source driver stack.
As mentioned in the other Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 article for this Sunday embargo lift date, to enjoy RDNA3.5 graphics on Linux you’ll want to be using the latest Linux 6.10+ stable kernel series and Mesa 24.1~24.2+ plus also needing a recent linux-firmware.git snapshot for the necessary graphics firmware binaries. Unfortunately that means no accelerated graphics out-of-the-box on the likes of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS but come Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and others this autumn there will be the out-of-the-box experience for those that may not be buying an AMD Ryzen AI laptop for a few months. For my testing I was riding Linux 6.10 with Mesa 24.2-devel via the Oibaf PPA atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and pulling in the latest linux-firmware.git firmware.
As outlined in the other article, initially even with the up-to-date software stack I was encountering some screen freezes and kernel errors with the RDNA3.5 graphics on the ASUS Zenbook S16 laptop that was provided by AMD. AMD Linux graphics driver engineers hadn’t encountered the same behavior, so may be due to laptop / system firmware specific behavior. But given the kernel errors did reference DMCUB, they did send over some newer RDNA3.5 firmware files than what was currently in linux-firmware.git: new PSP and DMCUB firmware files. With those firmware files, those initial issues went away. Hopefully in the coming days those updated AMDGPU firmware files will work their way into linux-firmware.git for other early adopters.
When testing out other kernel configurations and continued testing, I did run into some other random stability issues particularly when trying Linux 6.11 Git. For that I was recommended by driver engineers to disable Panel Self Refresh (PSR) as it can be a bit touchy on some laptops. That can be easily done via setting the amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x600 module parameter at boot time to disable PSR. Since then I haven’t had any graphics troubles with the ASUS Zenbook S16 laptop with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
