Radeon Windows 10 vs. Linux RadeonSI/RADV Gaming Performance

The Talos Principle by Croteam is one of the more interesting Linux test-cases thanks to Croteam's renderer options. Croteam provides OpenGL and Vulkan renderer options on Windows to complement their Direct3D 11 renderer while on Linux there is OpenGL and Vulkan support. Sadly, when starting The Talos Principle with RadeonSI is still a message box about the graphics driver (RadeonSI) not being supported.

Even with the lowest quality options, the RadeonSI driver's OpenGL performance was noticeably behind the Windows' Radeon Software Direct3D 11 and OpenGL performance by a long shot.

When testing Vulkan, the RX 480 with Radeon Software Crimson ReLive failed to run this test but the R9 Fury ended up working fine. These results with the R9 Fury though show that the RADV Vulkan driver is just over half the speed of the AMD Windows Vulkan driver.

When increasing the visual settings to ultra, the OpenGL Windows vs. Linux performance was much closer although D3D11 was still faster than OpenGL for this game.

With the ultra image quality settings on Vulkan, the Radeon Software Vulkan driver was about twice as fast as the RADV Linux driver on Mesa 17.1-dev.