5.4 was released in November 2019, while Navi with the 5x00 series was released in July 2019, so that's actually 2 release cycles or so of the kernel before hit

5.4 was released in November 2019, while Navi with the 5x00 series was released in July 2019, so that's actually 2 release cycles or so of the kernel before hitting stable support. For comparison, Intel already has Gen12 graphics support in place across the entire software stack despite the fact Tiger Lake/Xe are not available until later this year (Mesa support for Gen12 was merged in Oct 2019!) AMD is just comparatively not as good about this, frankly, and I say that as someone who has the luxury to (and often does) run -rc kernels for latest hardware. This is not only true of their graphics cards, but to some extent their CPUs as well. They need to get their software support up earlier. I get that there are issues like supply chains, OEM firmware, and all that jazz, but they aren't amateurs flying by the seat of their pants here, they're capable of doing this. If I had to guess I'd say it's simply because AMD's software department seems stretched pretty thin, where as the competitors have enormous software teams. Hopefully they can fix that.