NVIDIA vs. AMD OpenCL Linux Benchmarks With Darktable 2.2

The third and final demo scene with our Darktable test profile is with the server room scene. On that front the RX 480 was competing with NVIDIA's top-end Pascal GPus while the R9 Fury and other newer GCN GPUs were slower and running behind the GTX 1060 / GTX 980.

Similar to our other OpenCL benchmarks we have carried out in the past with Radeon GPUs using the AMDGPU-PRO driver, this proprietary OpenCL stack overall performs competitively with GeForce GPUs on the latest NVIDIA Linux drivers. It will be great once that AMD OpenCL stack is fully open and widely usable, hopefully we'll see that milestone achieved in 2017.

If you have Darktable installed on your system and want to compare your own system's performance, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark darktable or phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1612286-TA-DARKTABLE68 if wishing to run a fully-automated side-by-side comparison against all of the GPU results found in this article.