Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Graphics Performance With Radeon Software, AMDGPU-PRO, AMDGPU+RadeonSI

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 18 June 2016 at 10:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 7. 66 Comments.

Yesterday I published some Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux gaming benchmarks using the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Those numbers were interesting with the NVIDIA proprietary driver but for benchmarking this weekend are Windows 10 results with Radeon Software compared to Ubuntu 16.04 running the new AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver as well as the latest Git code for a pure open-source driver stack.

Under Windows 10 Pro x64, the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.6.1 driver was used for benchmarking. Under an updated Ubuntu 16.04 stack, tested first was the AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 (16.20.3) driver. After testing this hybrid driver, the Linux 4.7 Git kernel was installed along with Mesa 12.1-dev and LLVM 3.9 SVN via the Padoka PPA for providing a very bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD/Radeon Linux graphics driver performance.

The same system was used throughout all of the testing:

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 Linux Radeon

For this testing a Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury was used during the benchmarking process for its AMDGPU compatibility and being the most interesting piece of Radeon hardware I have at the moment. Once the Radeon RX 480 is out, I'll repeat with a similar Windows vs. Linux comparison assuming there are enough interested Phoronix Premium subscribers to make that testing happen. Joining Phoronix Premium also allows you to view multi-page articles on a single page, see the site ad-free, and more. Speaking of which, if you'd like to see more tests like these happen, please consider showing your support by going premium to make more time-consuming Linux hardware comparisons possible especially when some of the tests ran for this testing require manual tests that don't meet my strict standards for Linux benchmarking.

Tests for this article included Unigine, Xonotic, Tomb Raider, GRID Autosuport, Talos Principle, Dota 2, Metro Last Light Redux, Shadow of Mordor, F1 2015, Insurgency, BioShock Infinite, and Company of Heroes 2. For many of these titles when running under AMD hardware on Linux, there continues to be unsupported/warning messages about unsupported hardware/drivers. But AMDGPU-PRO managed to run all tests for this article with the exception of F1 2015. The Linux 4.7 + Mesa 12.1-dev driver stack did work with a majority of the games, but for a few there were still issues.


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