Radeon Ubuntu Linux Users Have A Lot To Gain By Upgrading Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 10 January 2017 at 12:00 PM EST. Page 1 of 5. 37 Comments.

For those curious about the performance difference if upgrading to third-party PPAs from Ubuntu 16.10 when using a modern AMD Radeon graphics card with the open-source driver stack, here are some fresh numbers.

Up today us comparing the performance of a Radeon RX 480 Polaris graphics card when running out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 16.10 (Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12.0.3), then switching to the Mesa stable PPA with currently Mesa 13.0.2, then switching to the Padoka PPA with Mesa Git (13.1-devel, just ahead of its renaming to 17.0-devel), and then lastly moving from Linux 4.8 to Linux 4.10 while keeping with Mesa 13.1-devel for a bleeding-edge complete user-space/kernel AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack.

ubuntu-1610-rx-480-fresh

All of these tests were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. You can compare your own system's Linux OpenGL performance to the results in this article by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1701070-RI-UBUNTU16194.


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