Mesa 19.0 RADV vs. AMDVLK 2019.Q1.2 vs. Radeon Software 18.50 Linux Vulkan Performance

With the latest AMDVLK Vulkan driver improvements back to coming out on a weekly basis by AMD and Mesa 19.0 development progressing ahead of its feature freeze later this month, here is a fresh Linux gaming benchmark comparison of the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver options on Linux. Tested this round with a Radeon RX 590 and RX Vega 64 was the latest Mesa 19.0 development state for RADV, this week's new AMDVLK 2019.Q1.2 driver snapshot, and the Radeon Software 18.50 proprietary driver while running a slew of Vulkan-powered Linux games and DXVK.

From Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS while using the Linux 4.20 stable kernel, these three Vulkan driver options were tested of the newest AMDVLK public driver code using the official AMD-provided packages, Mesa 19.0-devel as of this week built against LLVM 8.0 SVN using the Padoka PPA, and the "PRO" driver components of Radeon Software 18.50 as the latest Linux packaged driver release available from AMD's web-site. As a reminder, the "PRO" Vulkan driver is derived from the same sources as AMDVLK but rather than using the LLVM compiler back-end is still using AMD's proprietary shader compiler.

The system obviously remained the same throughout testing besides swapping the Polaris and Vega GPUs and the three Radeon Vulkan Linux driver options. A variety of Vulkan workloads were benchmarked while this round wasn't focused on any OpenGL testing. All of these benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.