Radeon Software 18.50 vs. Linux 4.20 + Mesa 19 Benchmarks On The AMD RX 590

A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia offered similar frame-rates between the two AMD Vulkan driver options tested but using RADV yielded higher peak frame times.

Total War: Warhammer 2, the newest Linux game port from Feral Interactive, yielded similar performance between driver setups.

The Tesseract open-source first person shooter yielded a 27% speed boost with the latest Mesa stack.

Unigine Superposition also was the fastest on RadeonSI.

Of 49 tests run on both Radeon Software for Linux 18.50 "PRO" and Linux 4.20 + Mesa 19.0-dev, winning 32 of the tests (65% of the time) was the fully open-source RADV/RadeonSI Mesa-based driver stack while the PRO 18.50 components yielded the fastest performance in only 17 tests. In the cases where Radeon Software for Linux 18.50 was faster is primarily limited to select Vulkan games where AMD's proprietary shader compiler still is yielding faster performance than the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end. When it comes to OpenGL games, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver simply dominates the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver. About the only advantage to the closed-source AMD OpenGL driver is its support for GL 4.6 while RadeonSI is still limited to GL 4.5 until its SPIR-V ingestion support is completed.