Executive Summary

  • NVIDIA has released its new R595 Linux driver (595.45.04 beta), showcasing incremental performance improvements for their new “Blackwell” RTX 5090 GPUs in Vulkan, OpenGL, and compute workloads.
  • An AMD community member reported widespread visual artifacts (texture shimmering/crawling pixels) on an RX 5700 GPU, though the full bug report details were obscured by a scraping block.

🤼‍♂️ Market & Competitors

[2026-03-09] NVIDIA 595 Linux Driver Running Well In Early Benchmarks

Source: Phoronix (AMD Linux)

Key takeaway relevant to AMD:

  • NVIDIA continues to aggressively optimize its Linux graphics and compute stack for the latest “Blackwell” architecture (RTX 50-series). AMD will need to ensure its competing open-source Linux Mesa drivers and ROCm compute stacks maintain pace, particularly for extreme high-resolution (6K) workflows and high-end compute workloads where NVIDIA is demonstrating stable performance gains.

Summary:

  • NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 beta Linux driver, the first public build in the new R595 release branch.
  • Early benchmarks comparing this beta to the stable 590.48.01 driver show incremental performance gains on the GeForce RTX 5090 across graphics and compute tasks.

Details:

  • Driver Versions Analyzed: The benchmarks compare the newly released NVIDIA 595.45.04 beta against the current NVIDIA 590.48.01 stable release.
  • Hardware Tested: Testing was conducted on NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 5090 (“Blackwell” architecture).
  • Feature Updates: The R595 branch introduces Vulkan driver improvements, HDR enhancements, and DRI3 v1.2 support to the Linux ecosystem.
  • Testing Methodology: Phoronix stressed the RTX 5090 at extreme resolutions (4K and 6K) using a massive Dell UltraSharp U5226KW 52-inch 6K monitor.
  • Workloads: The performance comparison evaluated OpenGL graphics, Vulkan graphics, and NVIDIA GPU compute benchmarks, noting positive incremental optimizations.

💬 Reddit & Community

[2026-03-09] Shimmering / crawling pixels on textures in all games (RX 5700)

Source: Reddit AMDGPU

Key takeaway relevant to AMD:

  • Legacy RDNA 1 (RX 5700) users are reporting visual artifacts (“shimmering/crawling pixels”) across multiple games. AMD developer support teams may want to investigate the thread manually to determine if this is a hardware degradation issue, an isolated user error, or an emerging driver regression within the Linux AMDGPU or Windows Adrenalin stack.

Summary:

  • A user reported an issue regarding shimmering and crawling pixels on textures affecting all games while using an AMD Radeon RX 5700 GPU.
  • The text of the original post was not successfully retrieved due to automated bot-blocking by Reddit’s network policies.

Details:

  • Hardware Subject: AMD Radeon RX 5700 (First-generation RDNA architecture).
  • Reported Issue: Global visual artifacting across all tested games, specifically described as “shimmering” or “crawling pixels” on textures. This is highly indicative of texture filtering issues, broken anti-aliasing implementations, or failing VRAM.
  • Data Retrieval Failure: The raw content of the user’s troubleshooting steps, driver version, and operating system could not be parsed. The scraping application was blocked by Reddit’s Terms of Service network policy.
  • Error Trace: The block generated tracking code 019cd2e9-a199-7fe8-a2c1-09b874846b20, citing an empty or non-unique User-Agent string.
  • Actionable Advice: Analysts or AMD community managers should navigate directly to the provided URL to access the missing diagnostic details and assist the user.

📈 GitHub Stats

Category Repository Total Stars 1-Day 7-Day 30-Day
AMD Ecosystem AMD-AGI/GEAK-agent 69 0 0 +8
AMD Ecosystem AMD-AGI/Primus 78 +1 +4 +5
AMD Ecosystem AMD-AGI/TraceLens 63 0 +3 +5
AMD Ecosystem ROCm/MAD 31 0 0 0
AMD Ecosystem ROCm/ROCm 6,229 +1 +20 +82
Compilers openxla/xla 4,056 +6 +28 +86
Compilers tile-ai/tilelang 5,342 +8 +44 +261
Compilers triton-lang/triton 18,593 +11 +75 +227
Google / JAX AI-Hypercomputer/JetStream 415 0 +1 +10
Google / JAX AI-Hypercomputer/maxtext 2,164 +1 +8 +31
Google / JAX jax-ml/jax 35,032 +12 +49 +222
HuggingFace huggingface/transformers 157,607 +55 +348 +1424
Inference Serving alibaba/rtp-llm 1,058 +1 +2 +17
Inference Serving efeslab/Atom 336 0 0 0
Inference Serving llm-d/llm-d 2,591 +4 +39 +133
Inference Serving sgl-project/sglang 24,263 +40 +304 +857
Inference Serving vllm-project/vllm 72,542 +133 +872 +2827
Inference Serving xdit-project/xDiT 2,563 +1 +11 +37
NVIDIA NVIDIA/Megatron-LM 15,556 +12 +80 +406
NVIDIA NVIDIA/TransformerEngine 3,190 +4 +12 +47
NVIDIA NVIDIA/apex 8,928 0 +1 +18
Optimization deepseek-ai/DeepEP 9,033 +9 +24 +67
Optimization deepspeedai/DeepSpeed 41,771 +9 +57 +213
Optimization facebookresearch/xformers 10,362 +1 +7 +34
PyTorch & Meta meta-pytorch/monarch 987 +1 +6 +29
PyTorch & Meta meta-pytorch/torchcomms 347 +1 +4 +17
PyTorch & Meta meta-pytorch/torchforge 635 +1 +9 +22
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/FBGEMM 1,538 +1 +4 +11
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/ao 2,726 +2 +16 +59
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/audio 2,835 +1 +1 +13
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/pytorch 98,073 +32 +190 +852
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/torchtitan 5,118 +4 +18 +75
PyTorch & Meta pytorch/vision 17,550 +1 +9 +55
RL & Post-Training THUDM/slime 4,639 +26 +120 +935
RL & Post-Training radixark/miles 961 +3 +29 +113
RL & Post-Training volcengine/verl 19,754 +41 +231 +707