Mesa 17.3 With RADV Vulkan Running Great With Polaris, Starts To Outperform AMDGPU-PRO

Mad Max at 1080p was faster with the RADV driver on the RX 580 Polaris card over AMDGPU-PRO 17.30. AMDGPU-PRO was also running into OpenGL issues for this game.

At 4K, Mad Max on the Polaris GPU was still running better on the open-source RADV driver over AMDGPU-PRO.

Overall these are some of the most exciting RADV Vulkan driver numbers we have seen yet. In multiple cases the RADV Vulkan driver is now running significantly faster than the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver. David, Bas, and the others involved on RADV have done a phenomenal job advancing this in-tree Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver while AMD has yet to officially support it nor have they released their source code yet to their own Vulkan driver. It will be interesting to see what happens given AMD's lag time in opening up their driver that they've been talking about since the Vulkan 1.0 debut while RADV has really matured, its performance is becoming superior in many instances, and it's also now Vulkan 1.0 conformant via the Khronos process.

Mesa 17.3 with the RADV Vulkan driver improvements and other new features will be released as stable around mid-November. Stay tuned for more Linux GPU benchmarks.