AMD's next-gen Radeon RX 8000 gaming GPUs make an appearance; discrete RDNA4 GPUs spotted in Linux patches

AMD’s Linux developers have been spotted posting patches for new GFX12 Targets on GitHub (h/t Phoronix). Specifically, two new discrete GPUs from AMD, expected to be the first to feature the RDNA4 graphics architecture, have been added as targets to the Linux LLVM compiler. These could be the first two members of an upcoming Radeon RX 8000 family of desktop GPUs.

The idea that GFX12 represents RDNA4 architecture GPUs hasn’t been plucked from thin air — previous AMD Linux patches referred to RDNA1 as GFX10, RDNA2 as GFX10.2, and RDNA3 as GFX11. Meanwhile, in October, a mysterious set of GFX11.5 support patches popped up in Linux’s Mesa 23.3 graphics driver. GFX11.5 is expected to be an RDNA3 refresh, but that has yet to be proven as we haven’t seen any such hardware officially introduced as yet.

Looking more closely at the two new compiler targets, we see that GFX1200 and GFX1201 are marked as “dGPU” components in the patches – thus, discrete GPUs or desktop graphics cards. Development is still at a relatively early stage for GFX12, as the patches reveal no details about the upcoming graphics ISA or its features. Details should be fleshed out nearer to the release of these discrete AMD GPUs. For now, developers are told in the GitHub project that the code will treat the new GFX12 GPUs as if they “behave identically to GFX11.”

Phoronix notes that the development work on GFX12 support in LLVM is required for upcoming support of these GPUs in things like the AMD ROCm compute stack, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, and more.