How The RadeonSI Performance Has Evolved For Navi 10 Since Launch
Back on launch day for our initial Radeon RX 5700 series Linux tests it was just coverage of the RadeonSI OpenGL driver with not getting any packaged Linux driver in advance, the RADV code not hitting until later that day as a surprise, and AMDVLK code not being cleared yet for release. All those have since been resolved while for this article is looking at how the Mesa RadeonSI performance has evolved from those original results in the days of testing prior to the 7 July launch to now how the two Navi 10 cards are performing at the end of July.
The same system was used for testing as in that earlier comparison and the difference is just now using the latest Linux 5.3 development kernel as well as the latest LLVM 9.0 AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and the latest Mesa 19.2-devel code as of this weekend. This shows the current Navi performance in the state that is close to final for Mesa 19.2 with that feature freeze being about just one week away and now also being past the Linux 5.3 merge window granted more Navi fixes could still make it in before the 5.3 stable kernel.
Since launch, RadeonSI has picked up many fixes, various OpenGL features, and other bits. Granted with some features can mean more performance cost involved in the rendering, so this testing was being mainly driven out of curiosity purposes.
The Unigine Heaven performance on the Radeon RX 5700 is up by 7% compared to these launch-day results. The Radeon RX 5700 XT meanwhile in this demanding OpenGL test was up by 6%.
The CS:GO performance came in slightly lower on the latest state of the Radeon Linux driver code for Navi.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided also pulled back a bit compared to the launch-day performance. With more OpenGL functionality in place for Navi, it's possible the game is using different (more advanced) code paths and thus a hit to the performance if more rendering work is now taking place.
The HITMAN Linux port performed roughly the same.
Dawn of War 3 was running a few frames faster on the Radeon RX 5700 with the newest driver code while the RX 5700 XT was hitting an in-game hang.
If looking at the geometric mean of these results from roughly three weeks ago to now, there is a slight advantage to the newest code overall. >
See more tests in yesterday's fresh Radeon RX 5700 vs. NVIDIA Linux gaming comparison and stay tuned for more Radeon RX 5700 Linux benchmarks as we move into August and the different open-source driver components continue maturing.
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