9070 XT + Vulkan Shaders = terrible performance

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Just got a 9070 XT recently. Trying to run most emulators with Vulkan backend and a more demanding CRT shader like royale or guest advanced results in pretty poor performance, with frame rate drops and crackling audio. The frame drops are more frequent when the game changes screens (like going from a menu to in-game, or the change in the PS boot sequence). The exact same emulators, games and shaders with glcore run completly fine. Running with Vulkan and no shaders also seem to run fine. I did some limited testing on Linux and seem to have the same issue. Swanstation seemed to be the worst in performance, with bsnes and genesis plus GX issues being less severe. Runahead on or off made no difference.

This same computer (ryzen 5 5600, 32gigs of ram) with a 1660 super was running everything with Vulkan no problem. I tried every single driver version available for the 9070 XT to no avail. Any ideas what could be the issue?

#2

hello Test with “Async Shader Compilation”

In RetroArch:

Go to Settings > Video > Vulkan Driver Options

Enable “Asynchronous Shader Compilation” if available.

Otherwise try an older version of RetroArch 1.17.0

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#3

It seems there are some issues which need to be fixed with 9070 XT and RADV Vulkan driver.

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#4

I tried using the latest nightly (2025-07-14) and the issues seems to be gone (I was using 1.21.0 stable before). I will test a little more later, but Swansation is not hitching anymore with any shader, seem to be performing identically to glcore.

I don’t have that option in my video settings, is there any way to enable it? Some “advanced options” toggle somewhere? Always nice to have more options for testing in the future.

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#5

Updating my previous build to nightly, the issue persist. With a fresh install, it’s gone. Might be some config leftover that was causing it. Linux was a fresh install and still had issues, but might be related to:

If anyone has similar issues with this GPU, try a fresh install of nightly.

#6

After more testing with the fresh install, while performance problems are not as bad, they are still an issue. Cores I had no issue running before on a Nvidia card and same CPU are giving me random sound crackling, specially with run ahead. Bsnes-jg in special is pretty bad, but even regular Bsnes is having issues. Frametimes are also much more unstable. Tried multiple video drivers (glcore, vulkan, dx12), with and without shaders. On a freesync monitor, keeping vsync on also worsens the performance compared to off, in both cases with freesync working properly and sync to exact framerate.

Using 1.17.0 seems to fix all the issues. Better frametimes, even just on the menu. Bsnes also runs flawlessly with 1 frame of runahead. Not sure if these issues are AMD related in general or just the new 9000 series, but something is broken somewhere in newer versions of RA.

#7

Swanstation still runs poorly with vsync on even on 1.17, but frame time fluctuations of most cores are better, as well as no frame drops on more demanding cores like bsnes.