AMD Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 Deliver Great Open-Source Linux Performance At Launch

The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.

I've been testing out the Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 cards the past week and so far it's been working out rather well -- both for using the new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver on supported enterprise Linux distributions as well as when "rolling your own" driver stack using the upstream open-source code.

This actually is the first time I've received any Radeon PRO samples in about a decade... since pre-GCN FirePro days. Thus unfortunately I don't have the rest of the current Radeon PRO line-up for comparison or the prior generation PRO offerings, but nevertheless it was quite interesting in looking at these cards under the current Linux driver stack.

The Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver stack provides a build of Mesa 23.1 for the RadeonSI Gallium3d (OpenGL) support as well as video acceleration. It defaults to using the "PRO" Vulkan driver and there is also the ROCR-based OpenCL compute stack. AMD is in the process of rolling out full ROCm support for RDNA3 graphics albeit not expected for a few months. In any event the OpenCL / Vulkan / OpenGL support was all working on this packaged driver as well as if using the upstream Linux kernel and Mesa. (Rusticl OpenCL vs. rocrOpenCL benchmarks are also the focus of a follow-up Phoronix article.)

This open-source and upstream driver support for the Radeon PRO W7600 series graphics is something that can't be said for the competing NVIDIA products. NVIDIA does now offer their open-source GPU kernel driver components distributed as part of their packaged driver, but that driver is not upstream and all of NVIDIA's user-space driver components remain proprietary.

Nouveau developers at Red Hat and elsewhere continue working on embracing the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) for enabling newer generations of NVIDIA GPU support and to ideally offer decent performance by overcoming the current re-clocking limitations of the current Nouveau DRM kernel driver. But that's all a work-in-progress still. The NVK Vulkan driver also continues to be developed for eventually landing in Mesa but also relies on Nouveau kernel driver enhancements.

At the moment the best open-source NVIDIA driver support remains with the aging Kepler graphics processors.... There isn't any viable fully open-source driver stack for recent generations of NVIDIA's consumer or workstation/professional graphics offerings.

Intel meanwhile has a full open-source driver stack at launch but it wasn't until earlier this year that their compute stack matured well and that the DG2/Alchemist hardware was enabled out-of-the-box on Linux. Intel's discrete graphics offerings are now in good shape with the very latest open-source driver stack for professional purposes (gaming can still be an issue over the lack of Vulkan sparse support) but at time of launch they still had upstream driver support in flux.

With being the first time having any new Radeon PRO products in years, I was curious about the upstream support and performance at launch. I ran various OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks across the following configurations under Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS:

- Radeon Software for Linux 23.10.3 with the default (Mesa 21.3 based) OpenGL driver support and PRO Vulkan driver support.

- Linux 6.5 Git paired with Mesa 23.3-devel Git. The Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 can work with current stable kernel and Mesa versions while for this testing I was using the latest development state to reflect the very latest open-source code for the AMDGPU kernel driver and RADV+RadeonSI in Mesa. Due to having only a few days for testing prior to launch day, I wasn't able to run benchmarks on other Mesa/kernel versions for today.

As mentioned, OpenCL benchmarks with the Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 graphics cards will be coming in a follow-up article.