AMD Radeon RX 480 On Linux

Lastly for this morning's Linux review of the Radeon RX 480 is checking out the Vulkan API performance for AMDGPU-PRO and NVIDIA supported hardware using Valve's Dota 2 game. With these Vulkan tests, I also tossed in some extra (older) NVIDIA Kepler graphics cards for additional reference.

When running Dota 2 at 4K with the new Vulkan renderer, the Radeon RX 480 was running faster than the GeForce GTX 980 but behind the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1070. With this AMDGPU-PRO 16.30.3 driver tested, the Vulkan performance was quite surprising with the R9 Fury even coming close to the GeForce GTX 1080 in Dota 2. With these Vulkan numbers, the RX 480 was just 10% faster than a Radeon R9 290.

When looking at the performance-per-dollar based upon these results, the Radeon RX 480 by far delivers the best value when testing Dota 2 with Vulkan.

The performance-per-Watt of the Radeon RX 480 was on par with the R9 Fury, which ended up being superior to the NVIDIA GeForce 900 "Maxwell" cards tested but obviously well behind the GeForce GTX 1070/1080 Pascal graphics cards. The performance-per-Watt of the RX 480 was 41% better than the R9 290 for this test.