Radeon RX 6600 Linux Performance Rising Even Higher With Newest Open-Source Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon RX 6600 Linux Performance Rising Even Higher With Newest Open-Source Driver

Just one week ago was the public launch of the Radeon RX 6600 as the newest offering in the RDNA2 GPU line-up. While in our Radeon RX 6600 Linux review the performance was good on AMD's well regarded open-source driver stack and standing ground against the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060 with NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver, it turns out the RX 6600 Linux performance can be even better already. Here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 on Linux across six different driver configurations.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30628

[aufkrawall]

Looks like amdvlk-pro has at least partially stopped receiving love (or optimizations don't appear timely anymore in new releases).
I'm not really surprised by the RADV wins, but that doesn't make them any less remarkable.

[uid313]

AMD should just abandon their "PRO" driver because judging by the benchmarks it appears to suck.

[Melcar]

Shame you can't get the cards (the few in stock are like $500). Windows comparison would be nice too, since last I checked there was still a substantial gap between the two drivers in many situations.

[Aggedor]

AMD should just abandon their "PRO" driver because judging by the benchmarks it appears to suck.

The Raden Pro driver's target audience is enterprise (workstation GPUs), not consumers. Achieving high frame rates in games or synthetic benchmarks isn't the goal of that driver.

[aufkrawall]

The Raden Pro driver's target audience is enterprise (workstation GPUs), not consumers. Achieving high frame rates in games or synthetic benchmarks isn't the goal of that driver.

Though it used to deliver the same performance as the Windows one. If it doesn't do this anymore on Linux, it probably is because they stopped caring to get the performance optimization of the Windows release branch to Linux quickly. This also was already the case with raytracing, and I think the -PRO driver still supports it only experimentally on Linux.
So basically they are slowly killing the -PRO Linux driver as being suited for games. They also stopped caring for -PRO shader compile bugfixes with DXVK, haven't fixed a single thing I reported (yes, it affects Windows the same).

Also notice the missing AMDVLK-open driver result for Dota 2. I suppose it's another infamous case of amdvlk being regressed. They got two "official" drivers and none of them is good...

[Black_Fox]

RX 6600 (either XT or non-XT) is something I'm eyeing as a replacement for my RX 570 - twice the performance for zero additional PSU wattage. Appreciate the additional test, after the previous kinda disappointing results the non-XT makes sense again!

[M@GOid]

Oh man, if the launch day performance already made the RTX 3060 look bad, those new numbers made its situation even worse. Cost more, is more power hungry, give less FPS. This is the direct opposite from the Vega 64 era.

This why people say if you are in Linux, AMD is the way to go. Things mostly only get better over time, to the point you don't even bother updating the default driver in your distro, when your card is old enough.

[aufkrawall]

While RADV clearly is the best driver that helps RDNA2 to shine for raster graphics, there are also quite some games playable with RT + DLSS on Linux with the 3060.

VRAM pressure btw. is extra bad with API wrappers.

[gremble]

Why is Linux 5.15 + Mesa 21.3-dev 1Oct performance so poor? It's lower than 21.2. Won't 21.3 be released soon?