Old Radeon revived, HD 7870 XT support lands for Linux AMDGPU
As we reported in earlier Linux driver coverage, Valve graphics engineer Timur Kristóf has been leading much of the work to move old AMD GCN 1.0 and 1.1 hardware onto the AMDGPU driver by default. That effort already brought better performance and RADV Vulkan support to many old Radeon cards on Linux. Now he is back with another fix, this time for one of the strangest models from that era, the Radeon HD 7870 XT.
According to Phoronix, the latest patch series focuses on Southern Islands hardware and specifically enables Radeon HD 7870 XT support under Linux. This card never properly worked with the open-source Linux graphics drivers at all. The reason is unusual hardware configuration. The HD 7870 XT was a harvested design cut down from a higher-end Tahiti-based part, which left AMDGPU struggling with partially disabled or fused-off TCC cache blocks.
That makes the card a familiar oddity for anyone who followed AMD’s 2012 lineup. On paper, these cards sat below the full Tahiti products, but they were never standard Pitcairn-based HD 7870 models either, which helps explain why Linux support turned into such a long-running edge case.
Source: Freedesktop
This new fix also fits neatly into the broader cleanup Timur has been doing over the last few months. In late 2025, he pushed for AMDGPU to become the default driver for old Sea Islands cards. Earlier this month, the remaining GCN 1.1 APUs such as Kaveri, Kabini, and Mullins were also lined up for the same default switch in Linux 7.1, which Phoronix described as completing the transition for all GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 hardware.
Phoronix points to a bug report from 2013 for a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT “Tahiti LE,” followed by another report in 2023 from a user whose card still did not work under Linux. Nearly 14 years after the first boards shipped, this rare Radeon is finally getting proper open-source driver support.
Source: Phoronix
