Mesa 21.0-devel RADV vs. AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 Vulkan Driver Performance

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers of Mesa's RADV and AMD's official AMDVLK are competing as we start the new year, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance for various Linux games (native and via Steam Play with DXVK) as well as Vulkan compute tests.

With Mesa 21.0 feature work wrapping up and the new AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 open-source AMD Vulkan driver having brought more RDNA2 optimizations, it's a good time for a comparison. For today's article the GPUs tested were a Radeon RX 5700 XT and then the new Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of Vulkan benchmarks were carried out from the Ryzen 9 5950X box running Ubuntu 20.10 with the Linux 5.11 Git kernel for both Vulkan drivers being tested in their out-of-the-box configurations.