Early Tests Of AMDGPU's DRM-Next Performance For Linux 4.12

With the big Radeon/AMDGPU pull request having been accepted into DRM-Next, here are some early tests of this new AMDGPU DRM code to premiere in Linux 4.12.

For this end-of-month, Friday night benchmarking was just some quick runs of a Radeon RX 480 Polaris card when tested atop Linux 4.10 stable, Linux 4.11 Git, and the DRM-Next tree as of today. That DRM-Next tree contains the main feature changes for AMDGPU slated for Linux 4.12.

Besides the initial (non-display) Vega support, this pull has TTM memory management improvements, job tracing improvements, and many other improvements. Tonight are just these RX 480 results to share while additional Radeon/AMDGPU tests of this early Linux 4.12 DRM code will come in the days ahead.

We previously reported on some AMDGPU performance improvements to find in Linux 4.11, likely attributed to TTM memory management work.

Excitingly, it seems Dota 2's Vulkan renderer is faster with RADV when running under the AMDGPU DRM code slated for Linux 4.12!

The 4.11 improvements for Dota 2 Vulkan were significant with AMDGPU+RADV, but it's looking even better for Linux 4.12.


Mad Max OpenGL appears slightly faster with the still-experimental DRM code.


Mad Max with Vulkan appears to have some minor benefits on DRM-Next.

There is this OpenBenchmarking.org result file with some more early results of the RX 480 on DRM-Next slated for Linux 4.12. In the days ahead I'll be running tests on more cards as well as on other systems to see if some of these performance improvements are definitively looking out for Linux 4.12.