AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance On Mesa 20.1 Looking Good With RADV+ACO

Since its mainlining in Mesa 20.0, the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has been helping to reduce game load times and often increasing overall Linux gaming performance both for native titles as well as those on Steam Play with Proton+DXVK/VKD3D. With Mesa 20.1 releasing in the coming weeks, here are some recent benchmarks showing the RADV+ACO performance on Mesa 20.1-devel compared to RADV using its default AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

Using a Mesa 20.1-devel snapshot from the Oibaf PPA last month while also riding on Linux 5.6 stable off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the RADV vs. RADV+ACO performance was compared for several graphics cards and a variety of games on Linux. The graphics cards tested this round were the Radeon RX 590 (Polaris), RX Vega 56 (Vega), RX 5700 XT (Navi), and Radeon VII (Vega 20).

The only difference during the tests besides swapping out the graphics cards was activating ACO via the RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various Vulkan native and Steam Play + DXVK tests were conducted.