AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 vs. RADV/RadeonSI Radeon Linux Gaming Performance

The Talos Principle is another Croteam game on Linux where the Vulkan performance is much faster with AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan over RADV. But it will be interesting to see if this changes once RADV developers are able to examine the official Vulkan driver's code-base.

Lastly with the Unigine Superposition benchmark, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver had the performance edge.

You may have noticed there are not any Dawn of War 3 or F1 2017 Linux benchmarks in this article. These games couldn't be tested with AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 as they were running into system problems in that configuration.

Long story short, the OpenGL performance with RadeonSI remains significantly better than AMDGPU-PRO for Linux gaming. In many modern Linux games, RadeonSI has double-digit gains over this latest AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL. As has been mentioned many times in recent months since RadeonSI began outperforming AMDGPU-PRO, the closed-source AMD OpenGL driver is basically good for workstation customers / those needing OpenGL compatibility context support.

The RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan (or whatever the open-sourced Vulkan driver ends up being called) situation is less clear. In most Vulkan Linux game tests, the official/proprietary-now-going-open AMD Vulkan driver does better than the Mesa-based RADV driver while the exception is the Mad Max Vulkan performance being close. Overall, the official Vulkan driver still has the performance edge but it also ran into show-stopping issues with F1 2017 and Dawn of War III making those games unplayable with AMDGPU-PRO 17.50. It will also be interesting to see if the RADV developers manage to squeeze any immediate performance gains in RADV once they are able to look at the official Vulkan driver's code. So stay tuned to Phoronix over the weeks/months ahead to see how the Radeon Vulkan Linux driver situation plays out.

Besides performance, other device feature differences between the various Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers was outlined here earlier today.

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