Vulkan/OpenGL Performance With AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 vs. Mesa 13.1-dev

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

Of the various benchmark-friendly OpenGL Steam games and such, those Mesa 13.1-dev vs. AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 benchmarks will come in their own featured article in the next day or two using the very latest Mesa Git code. This quick article is just looking at Dota 2 and Talos Principle due to their OpenGL and Vulkan renderers.

A look at the Dota 2 OpenGL and Vulkan runs:

With Dota 2 OpenGL, Mesa 13.1-dev on the Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury were slightly faster than the latest hybrid release.

Dota 2 Vulkan is faster than the OpenGL results as expected. For the Vulkan runs, the unofficial RADV open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa 13.1-dev was slightly faster than the yet-to-be-opened Vulkan driver in AMDGPU-PRO.

With The Talos Principle rendering to OpenGL, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 driver is faster than the RadeonSI OpenGL driver on the RX 480 and R9 Fury.

Unfortunately RADV seems to have regressed with The Talos Principle. The game worked with the -PRO Vulkan driver, but when trying to run the Vulkan renderer with either card on RADV, The Talos Principle would emit a message box about failing to set the video mode.

Stay tuned for more OpenGL Mesa 13.1-dev vs. AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 results shortly. I'll also be checking to see if today's release driver is any better for GCN 1.0 / SI than the earlier press driver that had the expressed Southern Islands problems.