RadeonSI/RADV Mesa 17.3 + AMDGPU DC vs. NVIDIA 387.12 Linux Gaming Performance

With Mesa 17.3 now having been branched for its stable release next month and that bringing much improved RADV Radeon Vulkan performance and more mature RX Vega support along with a ton of other improvements, here is a fresh comparison of the newest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver on a range of graphics cards.

The open-source AMD Radeon tests were done using the AMDGPU DC branch of the new code that's being queued for the Linux 4.15 kernel and will finally allow mainline display support for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. The user-space components included Mesa 17.3-dev as of this week built against LLVM 6.0 SVN for the AMDGPU compiler back-end, as packaged via the Padoka PPA for Ubuntu 17.04. The tested Radeon graphics cards for this comparison were the Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64.

On the NVIDIA side was the 387.12 beta driver as their latest public Linux graphics driver. The tested GeForce cards were the GTX 980, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti.

A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks from these competing vendors and Linux driver approaches were carried out all in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.