Raven Ridge APUs Get Minor Performance Boost With Latest RADV Vulkan Driver

The Raven Ridge Linux support continues to maturing. The latest on these Zen+Vega APUs using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack should be slightly better performance when using the RADV Vulkan driver.

RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen landed a number of commits on Wednesday to further enhance this Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver. With this latest work, he's now enabled binning and DFSM by default for Raven Ridge hardware. With this being enabled now for Raven, he's found a minor performance in the range of 2~3% for some demos and games tested.

The change-over to flip binning/DFSM on by default happened with this commit.

Last year is when these features became exposed in RadeonSI for the OpenGL driver with Vega/GFX9 hardware.

This patch and other RADV improvements will be part of next month's Mesa 18.2. In August will likely be my next Raven Ridge benchmarking test to see how the APU support is at for the AMDGPU DRM and RadeonSI+RADV given the rather rocky start for these AMD APUs earlier in the year.