I recently got an AMD Radeon 9070 XT and set up a fresh Arch Linux install using the Zen 6.14.2 kernel. Everything seems fine except Vulkan games crash on startup. For example, I tested Valheim, which runs great using OpenGL, but crashes right after the main menu when using Vulkan. My current software versions include Mesa 25.0.3, linux-firmware-git 20250410, and vulkan-radeon 25.0.3. Vulkan info reports the GPU correctly with Mesa RADV as the driver, so I thought everything needed for Vulkan support was installed. Still, Vulkan games won’t run properly. Has anyone run into similar issues or have ideas on how to get Vulkan working smoothly on this GPU with Arch?
3 Answers
I’m running Arch with Mesa 25.0.3 and the vulkan-radeon driver on my 9070 XT with no problems. Vulkan games I tested load and run fine. You might want to double check your setup or try other Vulkan titles to narrow down the issue.
I managed to get Valheim working by installing AMD’s proprietary Vulkan driver package called ‘amdvlk’ (version 2025.Q1.3). After adding that, vulkaninfo showed the AMD Open Source driver instead of just Mesa’s RADV, and Vulkan games started running without crashing. Seems Mesa 25.0.3 might still have some bugs or incomplete support for the 9070 XT with Vulkan right now. If you want stable Vulkan support on this card, try using amdvlk alongside Mesa and see if that helps.
Nice, thanks for the tip! I’ll give amdvlk a shot and report back.
Good find! I think this shows it might be a bug with RADV or Mesa for the new GPU. Reporting the issue to Mesa’s developers would be helpful so they can improve Vulkan support.
Valheim’s Vulkan support seems a little shaky on certain systems, so that might be the culprit here. You could try a Vulkan game known for stable support like Xonotic or others to see if the crash persists. Sometimes the game’s own rendering code messes with Vulkan behavior on newer GPUs.
Thanks, VulcanForge! Yeah, I’ll try other games too and see if it’s just Valheim being weird.