RadeonSI OpenGL vs. RADV Vulkan Performance For Mad Max

[ernstp]

That is easy to fix - Michael just needs to start running tests on the amdgpu-pro Vulkan driver again rather than acting as if radv is the only Vulkan driver for AMD hardware. If we were not working on open sourcing our Vulkan driver it would be easier to understand because radv would be the only option for open source stack users now and forever, but the current state basically punishes us for working on what we said we would do.

That's because amdgpu-pro is such a pain to install and use. It's almost like it's it abandoned already. You can't even install it on a new Ubuntu 16.04.2 installation, you need to roll back to an old kernel. You have no idea if and when bugs are fixed, things break randomly between releases, etc etc.. it's all been written before. We're soon at 3 months since the last release.

[marek]

I don't see what the issue is with Ubuntu 16.04.2. Ubuntu allows installing previous kernel versions from their package repository. You don't have to use the latest one.

[M@yeulC]

You mean something like this

No, my first impression was that the screenshots contained huge story spoilers. The benchmark names, too. Ugh... I have to finish this game. I just tried not to think about what I saw in the images.
Unfortunately, I think I would need a new graphics card to have better performance, it became sluggish around gastown with my 6870.

[mitch074]

In my case, the most annoying part is that AMDGPU-PRO's performance and stability leave much to be desired in OpenGL, prompting me to use Mesa instead and yes, a recent kernel, as OpenGL-using apps are far more numerous than Vulkan ones. However, installing the closed source Vulkan driver is dependent upon installing AMDGPU-PRO - which can only be done on Ubuntu 16.04's original release 4.4 kernel with AMD's current driver installer (which is pretty much building upstream amdgpu drm/kms code and then loading closed source userspace modules). But my RX480 doesn't work with linux 4.4.
So, if I want to switch between Mesa and AMDGPU-PRO, I need to change both kernel and graphics stack - so it's a reboot every time, compared with merely changing the stack which requires only an X restart (for now - Wayland is supposed to avoid even that).
Isn't it possible to use AMDVLK along with Mesa on a recent mainline kernel? I'm not asking for a separate installer, not even a script, but a list of steps to follow - say, install Oibaf (which doesn't include RADV), unpack AMDGPU-PRO and select this or that package to install, use dpkg to build this or that version for the kernel's module, and start the app with this or that setting.
Ideally, a separate installer would still be nice provided AMDVLK can be shipped as standalone.