AMDVLK Still Has Some Performance Advantages Over Mesa's Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver, But It's A Good Fight

As it's been a while since our last comparison of the two AMD Vulkan drivers for Linux gaming and with getting the Radeon VII situation straightened out here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers when running various Ubuntu gaming benchmarks with Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII graphics cards.

The AMDVLK Vulkan driver tests were using the new 2019.Q2.4 release while the RADV Vulkan driver was using Mesa 19.2.0-devel via the Oibaf PPA. All tests were done from Ubuntu 19.04 while running with a Linux 5.1 kernel. The only changes to the system were swapping of the RADV/AMDVLK drivers and testing both the Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII graphics cards for the current summer 2019 Vulkan gaming performance.

Various Vulkan Linux games were tested, both native game ports and Steam Play titles with DXVK. All of these tests were facilitated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software for automated benchmark orchestration. If you enjoy all these frequent Linux benchmark articles, consider joining Phoronix Premium ahead of Phoronix's 15th birthday next week.