AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 vs. Mesa 11.3 + Linux 4.6: Very Competitive For Linux Gamers

Now onto more demanding fun at 4K.

Similar to at 1080p, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was running around the same speed for these two drivers on the three tested graphics cards.

It's a similar story with Team Fortress 2.

Unigine Valley is a very demanding Linux benchmark and here the AMDGPU-PRO driver maintained a small lead.

Xonotic with ultimate image quality settings was also in front by a small margin at 4K.

These results were surprisingly close and more so than past comparisons. Has the newer Linux Radeon/AMDGPU DRM and Mesa 11.3-devel improved a hell of a lot? Definitely! There's also much better OpenGL 4 coverage now with RadeonSI (but still playing catch-up to AMD's proprietary driver) and new features coming about like OverDrive and the DAL display capabilities. While RadeonSI is doing very well and these results put it very close to the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL performance, keep in mind this proprietary driver is still in beta and isn't yet fully-optimized since they moved over to using the open-source kernel driver rather than their former fglrx kernel module. It is also important to remember from the results I published a few days ago, NVIDIA's Linux OpenGL driver remains much faster than the open-source AMD performance and thus AMDGPU-PRO too. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how both the RadeonSI Gallium3D and AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL drivers evolve as the year progresses.