AMD Begins Posting Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" Linux Patches For RDNA5 GPUs

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors.

With today's set of DC patches for the AMDGPU Linux drivers, there is continued work on expanding KUnit unit testing coverage of the display code, some fixes, refactoring around display stream validation, and then most significant is enabling DCN6 support.

These are the first public mentions of DCN6 for the next-generation display logic for upcoming AMD GPUs. Interestingly this DCN 6.0.0 IP is succeeding DCN 4.2.1.... Where is DCN 5? Going through today's patches there was at least one reference to DCN5, but no DCN5 bring-up is yet found in the AMDGPU driver. We'll see if that's coming if perhaps DCN5 is for some future AMD mobile platforms or so where DCN6 could be for the desktop graphics cards. Or perhaps DCN5 was ultimately skipped for unknown reasons.

The patches do tie some DCN6 references to GC/GFX 13.0.1 that is presumed to be RDNA5 with GFX13.

AMD DCN6 brings new scaling linearity and cositing surface features for planes, UPSP Pre-Scaler to upsample 420/422 content before scaling, and additional pixel formats, and other low-level changes.

With RDNA5 GPUs not expected to launch until 2027, we'll see what more open-source Linux graphics driver patches surface in the months ahead. Hopefully ahead of launch we'll see nicely baked open-source AMD RDNA5 graphics driver support.