Radeon Vulkan Driver Benchmarks: AMDVLK 2018.4.2 vs. AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 vs. Mesa 18.2/19.0

Dota 2 isn't that interesting of a Vulkan benchmark these days with there being many other Vulkan-powered titles out there, but given the popularity of the Valve game, we still test it. On the RX 580 and R9 Fury the performance of the RADV Mesa driver was similar to that of the AMDGPU-PRO/AMDVLK drivers. But for the Vega 64 graphics card those "official" Vulkan drivers are still much faster than the "community" Mesa RADV driver. Particularly with AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 that is built against the proprietary shader compiler, its performance was significantly better than the open-source AMDVLK built against the LLVM back-end for this game.

For the F1 2017 racing game, the AMDGPU-PRO/AMDVLK Vulkan performance was just frames better than RADV on the mature Fiji/Polaris graphics hardware, but with Vega the performance still dominates with the official AMD Vulkan code. RADV and the AMDGPU LLVM back-end still appear to have quite some room for Vega/GFX9 tuning.