No Performance Gains from Newer Drivers for Radeon RX 9070 Series on Ubuntu 26.04
Recent testing reveals that upgrading to bleeding-edge Linux drivers yields no significant performance improvements for AMD's latest Radeon RX 9070 series cards.
Testing Methodology
The Radeon RX 9070 GRE was initially benchmarked on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS using the system’s default driver stack: Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.0.
Comparative Results
Further testing with the more recent Linux 7.1 Git and Mesa 26.1.1 drivers—across both the RX 9070 GRE and the higher-end RX 9070 XT—showed no significant performance differences compared to the stock Ubuntu 26.04 drivers.
Potential Regression
A possible regression was observed for Mesa 26.1 specifically on the RX 9070 GRE when running the Breaking Limit ray-tracing benchmark.
Conclusion
Overall, upgrading to Linux 7.1 or Mesa 26.1 did not yield performance improvements.
Users of these cards on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS are unlikely to see a benefit from using unsupported or development driver branches for general performance gains.