The RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Performance Over 2018

[ms178]

Yes, I was not limiting myself to this particular topic (RADV) and sorry to get a bit off that rail. I just was a bit frustrated that such breakage did go unnoticed in their testing. The Chromium issue could also have been avoided by blacklisting AMD GPUs, not that it caused too much damage. Linux has come a long way since my last experiments with it during the late 90s. I tried out Manjaro, Ubuntu, Solus and Suse Tumbleweed during the last year. Tumbleweed with KDE was the best compromise for my needs so far. But there is still a lot of room for improvement to deliver a great end user experience (and maintain it over time).

[Grogan]

Vulkan is a very good piece of work, I'd like to see that unseat DirectX due to multi-platform availability. My first exposure to it was "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus" in Windows. I was reluctant to buy another Wolfenstein title, because I was used to AMD's implementation of OpenGL with the previous titles, but when I finally got it, I was amazed. "How can I be playing this game with full graphics settings on my hardware?". Then I realized it was Vulkan the game was using. Now I have removed that game from Windows and I play it with SteamPlay/Proton and it works almost identically, with one small difference. No artifacts or glitches. With the last several AMD driver iterations I used in Windows, I had a severe lighting bug that made it impossible to see in some areas of the game. Not so on Linux with amdgpu/mesa/radv and Proton :-)

I was also impressed with Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I bought for Linux because I heard (here, as a matter of fact) that it shined with the Mesa/Radv Vulkan implementation. I'll be buying "Shadow of" the instant it's released for Linux. I want it yesterday, but as a matter of principle I'm not buying it for Windows first.

With the exception of the original Serious Sam port back in the day, Croteam's games have always run like shit for me on Linux. Even that puzzle game is hitchy for me. Radeon R9 380 (amdgpu and mesa/radv)

Serious Sam Fusion, with Vulkan, is somewhat improved recently for me (better than SS3 ever was), but it's still not great.

[thxcv]

Chromium VAAPI HW acceleration (custom patch set which is now enabled by default with Suse Tumbleweed builds of Chromium) was not working correctly last time I checked (seems to be this: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109107). The Suse Factory build of Mesa 18.3.1 also brought Tumbleweed to hard lockup after trying to boot into the desktop. I don't know what the root cause there might be and if it is Tumbleweed specific or more general, but I can not say that everything works well on my new Polaris 10 card.

That is actually not a chromium-vaapi bug but caused by some other annoying problem that is i.e. also exposed by epiphany. You can start chromium with 'allow_rgb10_configs=false chromium' as a workaround. Fedora also builds with chromium-vaapi now....

[ms178]

Vulkan is a very good piece of work, I'd like to see that unseat DirectX due to multi-platform availability. My first exposure to it was "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus" in Windows. I was reluctant to buy another Wolfenstein title, because I was used to AMD's implementation of OpenGL with the previous titles, but when I finally got it, I was amazed. "How can I be playing this game with full graphics settings on my hardware?". Then I realized it was Vulkan the game was using. Now I have removed that game from Windows and I play it with SteamPlay/Proton and it works almost identically, with one small difference. No artifacts or glitches. With the last several AMD driver iterations I used in Windows, I had a severe lighting bug that made it impossible to see in some areas of the game. Not so on Linux with amdgpu/mesa/radv and Proton :-)

I was also impressed with Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I bought for Linux because I heard (here, as a matter of fact) that it shined with the Mesa/Radv Vulkan implementation. I'll be buying "Shadow of" the instant it's released for Linux. I want it yesterday, but as a matter of principle I'm not buying it for Windows first.

With the exception of the original Serious Sam port back in the day, Croteam's games have always run like shit for me on Linux. Even that puzzle game is hitchy for me. Radeon R9 380 (amdgpu and mesa/radv)

Serious Sam Fusion, with Vulkan, is somewhat improved recently for me (better than SS3 ever was), but it's still not great.

My experience with an older Nvidia Kepler card (GTX 670 with 2 GB VRAM) and Vulkan was quite miserable. Whereas OpenGL was working perfectly in Doom or the older Wolfenstein, their Vulkan implementation left a lot to be desired. Wolfenstein II was practically unusable for a year or so (and also only if you ran it with a custom config to save precious VRAM). Only with very recent drivers this situation has improved significantly.

But the recent price drops of Polaris cards convinced me to upgrade.

thxcv Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out over the holidays.

[thxcv]

thxcv Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out over the holidays.

btw it also works with wayland if you want to try that. But that probably entails a whole new set of other problems. My personal experience with wayland has not been so good...

[ms178]

That is actually not a chromium-vaapi bug but caused by some other annoying problem that is i.e. also exposed by epiphany. You can start chromium with 'allow_rgb10_configs=false chromium' as a workaround. Fedora also builds with chromium-vaapi now....

I've tried it out now and that workaround fixed my Chromium issue as well, thanks again! As for Wayland, I might try that out as well but have not been using it so far with AMDGPU.

[Grogan]

My experience with an older Nvidia Kepler card (GTX 670 with 2 GB VRAM) and Vulkan was quite miserable. Whereas OpenGL was working perfectly in Doom or the older Wolfenstein, their Vulkan implementation left a lot to be desired. Wolfenstein II was practically unusable for a year or so (and also only if you ran it with a custom config to save precious VRAM). Only with very recent drivers this situation has improved significantly.

I haven't had an Nvidia card in several years (I stopped using them because of too many hardware failures too early in their lives) so I can't comment on that, but Vulkan certainly does use a lot of graphics memory, especially if there is non-optimal culling in a game. I never thought 4 Gb of VRAM would get old, so fast but there's one area in Rise of the Tomb Raider (in the Russian Installation) that made me cut textures down to "high" because it was trying to use more video memory than I have.

[CochainComplex]

for me this benchmark results are showing some saturation. Like for any performance improvement process.

[digitalsin]

Not included was vkQuake, so I did some benchies of my own on a Vega 64.
Windows 500
RADV Linux (obaif ppa) 1000
AMDVLK Linux (amdgpu open [18.50]) + (AMDVLK [2019.Q1]) 1700
(That is with 8x AA.)

The GTX 1070 I got rid of did 359 in Windows.
SO yeah, I'd say AMD is doing a good job for Linux support =)