Recently acquired an AMD RX 9070 XT and had a few issues, so I thought I'd make this post in the hope it might help anyone else.

I use Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS; as far as it appears as of today, you should be good to go now, almost out of the box. If you try installing 24.04.3, you'll need to use safe mode to get into the live environment, but once installed and updated you should be good.

When I first got the card, I had to switch the mesa-2404 snap to use the beta channel, otherwise some snap-based installs didn't work, but it doesn't look like this is necessary any longer.

Critically though, if you get frequent random lock ups, as I did, with no discernible cause, what ended up resolving the issue was the solution proposed here.

Step by step, you can do the following essentially.

1. Open a terminal (CTRL + ALT + T)
2. 'sudo nano /etc/default/grub'
3. Update GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX to the following...

       GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xfff73fff"
       GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xfff73fff"
   

4. Finally use the 'sudo update-grub' command before rebooting your machine.

Once that's done, everything should in theory be good. This solution should work for Debian-based distros but for others I'm not sure if these instructions would work. I'd noted that newer Ubuntu releases, updating the kernel and updating Mesa did not resolve it otherwise.

I've now been good for about two days now. Playing games or doing anything that utilised the GPU would usually eventually trigger it, and having been doing a lot of that I'm 95% confident it's resolved.

If you're curious what this is doing, there's somewhat of an explanation here. Two of the masks that are excluded basically control over and under clocking, another is apparently related to the power control and the last one is just described as "stutter mode", whatever the hell that means.

Update 25-11: so it turns out I'm still encountering lock-ups, but now they seem to take days to occur rather than occurring multiple times a day. It's not perfect but it's good enough I'm not losing my mind at least. Guess all I can do at this point is hope eventually it'll get a proper fix.