AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1 RADV/RadeonSI Performance
Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.
For these latest "open vs. closed" AMD Linux driver comparisons are tests done with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury. Mesa 17.1-dev was from the Padoka PPA and built against LLVM 5.0 SVN. The Linux 4.11 Git kernel was from 9 April. AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 was tested with Ubuntu 16.10's stock Linux 4.8 kernel.
All of these Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan Linux benchmarks were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.