AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux Gaming Performance
The Radeon RX 6600 XT support on Linux is under the "Dimgrey Cavefish" moniker. AMD Linux graphics driver engineers began posting the public Dimgrey Cavefish patches back in September of last year with the AMDGPU kernel support that ultimately landed in Linux 5.11 and Mesa 20.3 brought initial Dimgrey Cavefish support last year too. Since then there has been more Dimgrey Cavefish work and RDNA2 enhancements more broadly to newer versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa.
As is usually the case for at-launch Linux GPU support when leveraging the open-source AMD Radeon and Intel graphics, "the newer, the better" for the best Linux graphics support and most optimized performance. My testing using Mesa Git (via the Oibaf PPA) and Linux 5.13~5.14 Git has been working out very well with the RX 6600 XT without hitting any issues.
The AMDGPU firmware binaries necessary for Dimgrey Cavefish have been in the linux-firmware.git tree since the end of June.
For those on an enterprise Linux distribution or environment lacking the Dimgrey Cavefish support, AMD will be releasing a Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver today that does have the RX 6600 XT support in place. A follow-up article this week on Phoronix will look at the upstream AMDGPU+Mesa vs. Radeon Software "PRO" driver performance on RDNA2.
The selection of 21 graphics cards tested/re-tested for this comparison based on the recent GPUs I had available included:
- GTX 1060
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2070 SUPER
- RTX 3060
- RTX 3060 Ti
- RTX 3070
- RTX 3070 Ti
- RTX 3080
- RTX 3090
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- Radeon VII
- RX 5500 XT
- RX 5600 XT
- RX 5700 XT
- RX 6600 XT
- RX 6700 XT
- RX 6800
- RX 6800 XT
All of the NVIDIA graphics cards were re-tested using the NVIDIA 470.57.02 driver while the AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested using Linux 5.14 Git and Mesa 21.3-devel via the Oibaf PPA. All of these graphics cards were tested from an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system running Ubuntu 21.04.
Let's see how this new 1080p-focused graphics card is performing under Linux with open-source...