AMDVLK vs. Mesa RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Performance On Linux

Kicking off a number of interesting articles over the week ahead for the Phoronix 19th birthday week is a fresh look at how AMD's official open-source Linux Vulkan driver "AMDVLK" compares to Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver that tends to be more popular with Linux gamers and is the driver backed by Valve, Red Hat, and other stakeholders.

This fresh AMDVLK vs. RADV comparison is using the recent AMDVLK 2023.Q2.2 driver up against Mesa 23.2-devel from Git master as of a few days ago. The Linux 6.3 kernel was in use while testing both of these Vulkan drivers. The RADV and AMDVLK drivers were tested on both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

The original plan was also to include the recently-launched Radeon RX 7600 but that graphics card isn't yet supported by the AMDVLK driver... The Radeon RX 7600 has been happily running with Mesa RADV while under the current public AMDVLK driver release is not supported.

With the Radeon RX 7900 series and testing the latest AMDVLK and RADV drivers, a range of Linux-native Vulkan software as well as various Windows games running on Linux by way of Steam Play were used for this Vulkan driver comparison.