AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 vs. Linux 4.8 + Mesa 13.1-dev Driver Comparison

Last week marked the release of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 driver as AMD's first hybrid driver since the 16.30 driver series over the summer that rolled out Polaris GPU support. With this first AMDGPU-PRO update in a few months, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the performance to the latest open-source driver code.

This article is a comparison of AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 as the newest hybrid binary driver compared to Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of this week via the Padoka PPA built against the LLVM 4.0 SVN AMDGPU back-end. Linux 4.8 was used rather than 4.9 due to the R9 Fury display support currently being regressed on that in-development kernel.

The AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 driver exposes OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.2, and Vulkan 1.0 support. The RadeonSI driver with Mesa 13.0~13.1-dev implements all GL 4.4/4.5 extensions but is only officially advertising OpenGL 4.3 until it completes the Khronos conformance tests. Vulkan support wasn't tested for this article due to an AMDGPU LLVM intrinsic issue with the current Padoka PPA builds for RADV.

The graphics cards used for testing in this article included the R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. For each graphics cards the two AMD Linux driver stacks were compared using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.