RADV vs. AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Ray-Tracing Performance For Mid-2024

Last week with delivering a number of AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks under Linux with the current drivers and using the new "Breaking Limit" benchmark, the question was raised how well does AMD's official "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver handle ray-tracing these days compared to the more popular Mesa RADV Vulkan driver used commonly by Linux gamers and as the default driver on most Linux distributions. Here is a fresh look at the RADV versus AMDVLK Vulkan performance on Linux with a focus on ray-tracing performance.

Using an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card I ran fresh benchmarks of Mesa 24.2-devel versus the AMDVLK 2024.Q2.3 Vulkan drivers while running on the Linux 6.10 Git kernel for both of those Vulkan API drivers. An Intel Core i9 14900K desktop was used for all of this testing in a straight-forward, AMDVLK vs. RADV comparison for seeing how these drivers are competing.

Mesa's RADV driver continues to be worked on by Valve, Red Hat, Google, and other parties while the AMDVLK driver is the officially maintained open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from AMD's internal Vulkan driver code-base. RADV continues to be popular due to it being part of Mesa and shipped by Linux distributions, all of the gaming optimizations made to it by Valve and other parties, etc.