Mesa 20.0's RADV + ACO Vulkan Driver Now Consistently Beating AMD's AMDVLK Linux Driver

The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver paired with the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end is yielding an incredibly power competitor to AMD's own AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the source-code of their shared Windows Vulkan driver code-base. Here are some year-end benchmarks looking at the RADV vs. RADV ACO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan driver Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu with several generations of Radeon graphics hardware.

Mesa 20.0-devel was from the Oibaf PPA this week for providing the very latest RADV Vulkan driver support as well as ACO, which has been mainlined since Mesa 19.3 but requires the RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable for enabling. The AMDVLK driver used was their latest public release, AMDVLK 2019.Q4.4 that came out last week. Throughout all testing, a Linux 5.5 kernel snapshot was in use.

The graphics cards tested this round included the RX 580 Polaris, RX 5500 XT Navi 14, RX Vega 64, and RX 5700 XT Navi 10 graphics cards all being tested on the latest drivers from this same system.