For Radeon Gamers On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, It's Generally Worthwhile Flipping On RADV's ACO

A premium supporter was asking this week whether for those newly-upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS if the graphics stack is in good enough shape or if I would recommend running Mesa 20.1-devel for better AMD Linux gaming performance... The short answer, sans any particular changes you are after in Mesa 20.1-devel, the bigger gain for running on this new Ubuntu release is to instead enable RADV+ACO as a much more pressing boost.

Following the Phoronix Premium member's request, I ran some Vega and Navi benchmarks to show the current difference of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with its Mesa 20.0 build compared to Mesa 20.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA as of a few days ago. The default (Linux 5.4 based) kernel and other software packages were kept at the same versions.

But besides just running Mesa 20.0 vs. 20.1-devel, I also tossed in ACO benchmarks. For the RADV Vulkan driver, ACO can be enabled with the RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable.



Across various benchmarks, the Mesa 20.0 vs. 20.1-devel performance wasn't that much different for tests I ran on both OpenGL and Vulkan. But the more interesting takeaway remains the much better performance for the RADV+ACO combination for faster Vulkan gaming on Linux, including under Steam Play.



If you haven't tried it yet, I would certainly recommend giving RADV+ACO a go for achieving better AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance over simply switching to Mesa 20.1-devel. With Mesa 20.0, ACO is generally in great shape and getting even better for Mesa 20.1 that will be out as stable by the end of May. See more cross-AMD-driver configurations in the recent Radeon Software 20.10 vs. upstream comparison.

More benchmarks soon including a look at whether changing out the Linux kernel build for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is worthwhile on the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack.