Radeon RX 6800 Series Seeing Some Small Gains With Linux 5.12

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 5 March 2021 at 12:09 PM EST. Page 1 of 2. 13 Comments.

When it comes to the AMDGPU kernel driver changes in Linux 5.12 for modern open-source AMD Radeon graphics, most notable is RDNA2 OverDrive overclocking support now being available as well as AMDGPU FreeSync over HDMI (pre-HDMI 2.1). But from initial testing the new in-development kernel is showing mostly subtle performance improvements for the Radeon RX 6800 series over Linux 5.11.

This week I ran some tests of the Radeon RX 5700 XT, Radeon VII, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT graphics cards with Linux 5.11 stable versus Linux 5.12 Git. (No RX 6900 XT for not having the card.) The Radeon RX 6800 series results ended up being most interesting with the RX 6800 XT in particular showing some gains.

Mesa 21.1-devel via the Oibaf PPA was in use while comparing the latest stable kernel version to the newest development kernel. A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan graphics Linux gaming tests were then carried out with the Phoronix Test Suite.

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