Mesa 18.2 vs. 18.3 vs. 19.0 January Benchmarks For RadeonSI/RADV

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze before the month is through, here are fresh benchmarks of the very latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards compared to the current stable Mesa 18.3 series and the former 18.2 release. This testing is complementary to last week's Mesa 19.0 RADV vs. AMDVLK vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan tests.

For the purposes of seeing how the latest Mesa 19.0 is stacking up on the Radeon side, tests were done with a Radeon RX 580 Polaris and Radeon RX Vega 56. Tests were done using Mesa 19.0-devel from the Padoka PPA built against LLVM 8.0 SVN AMDGPU and then against Mesa 18.3.1 stable with LLVM 7.0.0 (from the Pkppa) and then Mesa 18.2.2 built against LLVM 7.0 as is shipped by default currently on Ubuntu 18.10. So not only are we looking to see the current performance benefits of Mesa 19 but also whether the performance upgrade is worthwhile for those otherwise using the stock Mesa shipped by the current Ubuntu release.

Throughout all of the Mesa versions tested on the two AMD Radeon graphics cards, the Linux 4.20.3 stable kernel was being used. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using our open-source benchmarking software.