With this week's launch day review of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE , Ubuntu 26.04 with its Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0 default driver stack was used for testing. That choice was made since the Ubuntu 26.04 release is still fresh, the RDNA4-based RX 9070 GRE was working without issue there, and from other RDNA4 testing knowing there isn't much uplift from the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel or the current stable Mesa 26.1 OpenGL RadeonSI / Vulkan RADV drivers. But for those interested, here are those tests.

With the Radeon RX 9070 GRE being in good shape out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and that being what most users will typically stick to the defaults, that Linux 7.0 + Mesa 26.0 combination was used for all the Radeon and Intel graphics cards in this week's Radeon RX 9070 GRE Linux review. And in knowing no big gains out of either Linux 7.1 and Mesa 26.1.

But as enough readers were wondering, I fired up a run of Linux 7.1 Git and Mesa 26.1.1 just to confirm. I tested both the Radeon RX 9070 GRE and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards to compare the updated kernel and user-space drivers.







Not seeing any real differences out of these Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards with Linux 7.1 Git and Mesa 26.1 compared to Ubuntu 26.04 stock...







A possible regression for Mesa 26.1 on the RX 9070 GRE in the Breaking Limit ray-tracing benchmark.







Long story short, nothing exciting performance-wise out of the Linux 7.1 Git and/or Mesa 26.1.1 upgrade for the Radeon RX 9070 GRE and RX 9070 XT tested in these benchmarks.