AMD’s software engineers have been very busy of late, updating its Linux GPU kernel driver, shader compiler, and other code sources to provide support for its next generation of graphics architecture. Now it’s done the same for its RadeonSI OpenGL driver, adding almost 24,000 lines of code for GFX12, aka RDNA 4, to the Mesa open-source graphics library.
The big code merge was spotted by Phoronix and there’s only one reason why engineers would be so busy updating their code base for an architecture that isn’t currently on the market—it will be very soon.
RDNA 3, the current GPU chip design, is internally codenamed as GFX11 by AMD, so anything referring to GFX12 is clearly about its successor. I’m not talking about RDNA 3.5, which is listed as GFX11.5 and will only bring minor changes when it appears in AMD’s Strix Point and Strix Halo laptop APUs. All of the recent code merges are for RDNA 4, although the files themselves don’t tell us much about what we can expect from the forthcoming architecture.
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