Radeon Open-Source vs. Catalyst With OpenCL CLPEAK

With yesterday having started to run some fresh basic OpenCL benchmarks on the open-source Radeon driver given the interesting remarks by some super-computing researchers about having more hope for the open-source drivers than the proprietary Catalyst, here are some results comparing the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver code to the proprietary driver.

As mentioned with the original open-source Clover tests yesterday, the testing was basically limited to Clpeak for testing the peak OpenCL potential of the cards on the open-source driver. Unfortunately, the more complex (and real-world) OpenCL benchmarks aren't yet capable of running on the open-source Radeon driver stack with Clover Gallium3D state tracker for OpenCL compute.

So the results to share today are just the simple clpeak results on the latest open-source driver compared to the AMD Catalyst blob on Ubuntu 15.10. On the open-source driver side was the Linux 4.5-rc2 kernel, Mesa 11.2-devel built against LLVM 3.9 SVN, and the latest Radeon/AMDGPU DDX drivers. AMDGPU PowerPlay was enabled for the R9 285, but the R9 Fury had to be left out since its OpenCL compute wasn't working for this Fiji GPU.

The cards where I had working open-source OpenCL support and thus could be used for this comparison were the Radeon HD 6870, HD 7950, R9 285, R9 290, and R7 370. Well, that's the quick information you need to know before getting to this basic OpenCL comparison on Radeon vs. Catalyst.