Mesa's RADV Vulkan Driver Holds A Narrowing Lead Over AMDVLK With Ubuntu 21.10 On Wayland

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's RADV Vulkan Driver Holds A Narrowing Lead Over AMDVLK With Ubuntu 21.10 On Wayland

AMD this week released AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their last open-source Vulkan driver version of the year and with it came finally fixing the poor performance seen by that driver when running under Wayland such as with Ubuntu 21.04 and newer. Indeed, my tests have confirmed the AMDVLK performance now being in far better shape under Wayland, but is it enough to better compete now with Mesa's RADV alternative Vulkan driver? Here are fresh benchmarks.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30820

[Xicronic]

Shader compile times are light-years apart though, RADV is so much smoother on Proton when you encounter uncached shaders.

[mphuZ]

It is not entirely correct to compare the unreleased driver (22.0) and the released AMDVLK 21/4/3. It was necessary to show the work Mesa 21.3.3

[mphuZ]

Michael Is there any way you can test the shader compilation time in each driver? It would be very interesting to see the progress of LLVM in AMDVLK compared to proprietary Pro and ACO.

[Masush5]

Michael Is there any way you can test the shader compilation time in each driver? It would be very interesting to see the progress of LLVM in AMDVLK compared to proprietary Pro and ACO.

I've unscientifically timed it with shader pre-warming screens of some vulkan/d3d12 games and fossilize archive replays and open AMDVLK is still on average 10 times slower than RADV or the proprietary driver.

[microcode]

It is not entirely correct to compare the unreleased driver (22.0) and the released AMDVLK 21/4/3. It was necessary to show the work Mesa 21.3.3

The difference would be modest on this hardware, IIRC.

[Masush5]

It is not entirely correct to compare the unreleased driver (22.0) and the released AMDVLK 21/4/3. It was necessary to show the work Mesa 21.3.3

AMDVLK does a release on every git code drop, so the latest version is pretty much latest -git.

[Seebi]

I've unscientifically timed it with shader pre-warming screens of some vulkan/d3d12 games and fossilize archive replays and open AMDVLK is still on average 10 times slower than RADV or the proprietary driver.

Wow, that’s a large difference. Do you remember the games you tested? I’d be interested in testing as well.
Also, when did you run these tests? I remember some improvements during the last months. LLVM still doesn’t reach the speeds of ACO, but the gap is smaller than before.
A difference if 10x is most likely not caused by actual compilation speed, but due to shader caching (https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/llpc/pull/1283 fixed a bug there, it was probably part of a release in October).

[wallcarpet40]

Was NGG enabled, when testing Dirt Rally 2.0 in Mesa 22.0-devel and does AMDVLK support it? The difference between Mesa and AMDVLK is HUGE!

[user1]

It would be interesting to revisit RADV vs AMDVLK performance on Polaris, because last time I did some tests myself (before AMDVLK broke all my games with its switchable layer), the performance of AMDVLK was abysmal.
Speaking of Polaris, async compute is apparently broken on all PAL based drivers, along with some crucial Vulkan extensions broken as well (that was finally fixed after 3 and a half months).
Seems like AMD doesn't do enough QA for its PAL drivers on Polaris, which is still the most popular AMD architecture, at least according to Steam.