Mesa's RADV Vulkan Driver Holds A Narrowing Lead Over AMDVLK With Ubuntu 21.10 On Wayland

Total War: Three Kingdoms as another Linux game port by Feral Interactive and using Vulkan saw a slight edge with RADV.

The Basemark synthetic benchmarks with Vulkan saw RADV from Mesa 22.0-devel performing marginally better than AMDVLK.

AMDVLK is certainly performing better now on post-20.04 LTS Ubuntu releases now that their Wayland support is in better standing, but in best case scenarios this basically meant performance similar to the existing open-source Mesa RADV driver. It's a much more competitive race now between these open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers on Ubuntu 21.10 with the GNOME Wayland session but most often RADV was still holding a lead at least for this latest-generation RDNA2 testing.

Most Linux gamers will still be best off using the Mesa RADV driver as is commonly packaged across Linux distributions for the best gaming support and experience. RADV continues rapidly advancing thanks to the work by Valve and other stakeholders -- and it's also the Vulkan driver of the upcoming Steam Deck, so look for plenty more improvements to come to it in 2022.