RadeonSI Color Tiling Brings OpenGL Performance Boost

A few days back I delivered a fresh round of RadeonSI Gallium3D benchmarks showing the open-source AMD Radeon driver improving but still a long shot from the Catalyst driver. Shortly thereafter, it was announced the open-source driver would enable 2D color tiling by default. As earlier Phoronix benchmarks have shown, color tiling can be a big performance win so over the weekend I carried out some new performance tests looking at the impact of enabling color tiling for the RadeonSI driver that supports the HD 7000/8000 series and Rx 200 series graphics processors.

The benchmarks in this article build upon the data from last week, so if you didn't see that data that looked at the Ubuntu 13.10 stock performance against Mesa 10.0 and then Linux 3.12 Radeon with Dynamic Power Management, read that earlier article first. For this Sunday article the results are showing just the configurations of the Catalyst proprietary driver, the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source setup with the Linux 3.12 kernel with DPM enabled and Mesa 10.0 Git for RadeonSI, and then finally the same configuration (Linux 3.12 + Mesa 10.0 Git) but with the only change being the enabling of color tiling. The Catalyst driver in use was 13.11 Beta 6.

The graphics card used for this testing was the Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X 2GB and was running from an AMD FX-8350 Vishera setup. All of this OpenGL Linux benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite open-source multi-platform benchmarking system.