It's easy to get lightly obsessed with upgrading PC gaming hardware, but if Linux developer Linus Torvalds is still on an old card, maybe I don't need that RTX 50-series GPU just yet.
As spotted by Phoronix, Linus Torvalds is still rocking an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU in their rig, alongside an Intel i9 15th-Gen laptop. These were found in the notes for a DRM regression in Linux 6.17.
In these, a user asks, "Is that the Polaris card still?", to which Torvalds responds, "Same old boring Radeon RX 580. lspci calls it "Ellesmere", don't know about the Polaris codename."
When we reviewed it back in 2017, we gave the Radeon RX 580 an 88%, praising its whopping 8 GB of memory and good DX12 performance. We did note, however, that it uses more power than the Nvidia GTX 1060.
Launching at a price of $229 in April 2017, the Polaris 10-based RX 580 was built on TSMC's 14 nm process, with a base clock of 1257 MHz and a TDP of 150 W, and was AMD's top card of the day. Comparably, the 5 nm RTX 5050 has just launched at $249, also with 8 GB of memory (though GDDR6 instead of GDDR5), a base clock of 2310 MHz and a TDP of 130 W, and is the bottom of Nvidia's current stack.
The two GPUs have a similar number of shaders (with the RX 580 having 2304 and RTX 5050 having 2560), though given the years, architecture generations, and different manufacturers between them, that's about as apples to aardvark a comparison as you can make. The new GPUs also have RT units, tensor cores, and a lot more L2 cache (24 vs 2 MB) to play with.
As you might expect, what was considered a good amount of video memory back in 2017 is considered quite low right now, with Intel's budget-oriented B580 coming with 12 GB of GDDR6 RAM for a similar MSRP. AMD gear has picked up the reputation of 'ageing like fine wine', and sometimes leaned into that (*cough* Vega *cough*). But it kinda makes sense here, when creators ran the card on new games even last year and came away pleasantly surprised by its performance.
Not all of Torvald's setup is cheap, though. Phoronix points out he's currently running his rig through a 5K monitor, and it appears to be paired with a Ryzen Threadripper CPU.
Though it must be said, Torvalds running the RX 580 is surely less a testament to its gaming staying power than its role in a productivity rig. It's still a solid choice for someone working on Linux, partially thanks to its open source driver support, but it will still struggle even on new games with even modest system requirements.
Still, it's a sign that 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' is an adage for a reason, and one I could afford to listen to every now and then. If a card ages like fine wine, it would probably benefit from actually letting it age.
