AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Linux Performance
For this launch-day benchmarking the tests were carried out from Ubuntu 20.10 upgraded to Linux 5.12 Git, Mesa 21.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA for the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, and extracting the Navy Flounder AMDGPU firmware files from the packaged driver. From there I was quickly off to the races.
Tests were also carried out on Linux 5.11 and the RX 6700 XT driver support is in good shape. Above is the geometric mean across a wide range of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, basically confirming similar performance between Linux 5.11 and 5.12 Git.
There is though a big benefit to running the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Linux 5.12 instead and that is due to better power management... Thanks to additional power management bits in Linux 5.12 Git, the RX 6700 XT was responding better to conserving power during periods of idle or lighter workloads.
The improved Navy Flounder power management in Linux 5.12 Git can also help slightly with keeping the graphics card cooler in such conditions. But when it comes to the actual gaming performance, it's similar between the two kernels.
All the Radeon graphics cards were tested/re-tested on that Linux 5.12 Git + Mesa 21.1-devel tack. On the NVIDIA side the 460.39 proprietary driver was at play as their latest stable driver as of testing time. From the Ryzen 9 5950X system with Resizable BAR enabled, the graphics cards tested included:
- GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
- GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
- GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- GeForce TITAN RTX
- GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
- GeForce RTX 3080
- Radeon VII
- Radeon RX 5700 XT
- Radeon RX 6700 XT
- Radeon RX 6800
- Radeon RX 6800 XT
The comparison was obviously limited by the graphics cards I have access to, which meant no GeForce RTX 3070/3090 comparison points nor RX 6900 XT at this time. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out. During the benchmarking process the GPU power consumption and GPU core temperatures were also being monitored.