AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Ray-Tracing Performance On Linux With Breaking Limit
Basemark last week released GPUScore: Breaking Limit as a "groundbreaking cross-platform ray-tracing benchmark" that is scalable from mobile to desktops. They self-describe Breaking Limit as "the world's first true cross-platform benchmark for ray tracing." Given that and the benchmark meeting my benchmarking criteria, I've been trying it out on various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux.
GPUScore: Breaking Limit has a native Linux build available and that directly leverages the Vulkan API. Breaking Limit is a nice benchmark and the commercial version suits my benchmarking requirements around automation. Breaking Limit can be run with ray-tracing disabled as an additional interesting metric for looking at the overhead but it's designed to be used as a ray-tracing benchmark.
Curious about how well Breaking Limit is doing on Linux and stressing the major Vulkan Linux drivers, I cycled through various AMD Radeon RX 7000 series on the Mesa 24.2-devel RADV driver and then NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards with the latest R555 stable driver release.
In the case of the NVIDIA Linux driver with the RTX 40 GPUs, they all ran through Breaking Limit fine without any issues to speak of... Unfortunately, the Mesa RADV experience wasn't quite as pleasant. If using Linux 6.8 as stock on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, there were hangs at times. When using Linux 6.10 Git the experience tended to be better but for the lower-end graphics cards in particular there were still GPU hangs with AMDGPU kernel driver errors reported. When rebooting the systems, often times they were then able to run through Breaking Limit without issue.
In the end I was able to test all of the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with Linux 6.10 Git + Mesa 24.2-devel as of this week but with the occasional AMDGPU errors meaning the tests had to be restarted.
In this comparison are the following graphics cards tested:
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
- AMD Radeon RX 7600
- AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Breaking Limit was ran at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K both with and without Vulkan ray-tracing for seeing the difference on the performance.