Radeon Software 21.30 PRO vs. Mesa 21.3-devel + Linux 5.15 Gaming Performance

For those wondering how AMD's latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series is competing now between the Linux driver options of AMD's official Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 "PRO" driver stack and the latest upstream, fully open-source driver components from Mesa and the mainline Linux kernel, here is a fresh comparison.

Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 remains the latest public release of AMD's packaged Linux driver with the benchmarking for this article being of their "PRO" driver stack option that includes their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL driver components. On the pure upstream open-source side the tests were carried out using Mesa 21.3-devel Git as of testing time paired with the Linux 5.15 Git kernel for showing what the current potential is on the open-source OpenGL RadeonSI and Vulkan RADV drivers.

The graphics cards used for this Linux driver comparison were the latest generation Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6800 XT (the highest end AMD SKU I have available with still no access to the RX 6900 XT) graphics cards plus also tossing in the prior generation Radeon RX 5700 XT for reference. No other changes were made to the system during testing beside swapping out the driver and GPU configurations while running an assortment of Linux gaming benchmarks.