Mesa 22.1-rc1 AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance vs. NVIDIA

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

No new graphics cards are tested as part of this comparison (still lacking any RTX 3090 Ti) while this is mainly to provide some fresh Linux gaming performance numbers between AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce current offerings with the very latest drivers.

Benchmarks were carried out on Ubuntu 21.10 while using Mesa 22.1 as of its RC1/branching date from the Oibaf PPA paired with the Linux 5.17 kernel. On the NVIDIA side was the same Ubuntu setup with Linux 5.17 while using the latest NVIDIA 510.60.02 proprietary driver.

The range of graphics cards tested based on available cards and time constraints for not going too far back included:

- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- Radeon VII
- RX 5700 XT
- RX 6600 XT
- RX 6700 XT
- RX 6800
- RX 6800 XT
- RTX 2080 Ti
- RTX 3060
- RTX 3060 Ti
- RTX 3070
- RTX 3070 Ti
- RTX 3080
- RTX 3090

A range of Linux-native games as well as various Windows games via Steam Play (Proton) were benchmarked for offering this fresh look at the Linux gaming performance on the newest drivers.