AMD Radeon VII Linux Performance vs. NVIDIA Gaming On Ubuntu For Q2'2019
It's been three months now since the AMD Radeon VII 7nm "Vega 20" graphics card was released and while we hopefully won't be waiting much longer for Navi to make its debut, for the time being this is the latest and great AMD Radeon consumer graphics card -- priced at around $700 USD. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon VII on Linux and compared to various high-end NVIDIA graphics cards while all testing happened from Ubuntu 19.04.
Fortunately, the open-source Radeon VII Linux support is in fact in great shape. There was some confusion for some weeks and a lack of benchmarks recently since I had been unable to get my Vega 20 graphics card running reliably. Under different OpenGL/Vulkan workloads and even some desktop tasks, the graphics card would freeze and spewing from dmesg would most often be a load of VMC page faults and other errors stemming from AMDGPU. But after a lot of testing, ultimately it was figured out the graphics card became defective in some manner. The original card was a pre-launch Radeon VII review sample and was my lone Vega 20 GPU but has now been fortunately replaced by AMD. I received a new Radeon VII last week and since then has been under near constant load/testing. This new card has been working out well and I haven't encountered any issues with this retail card, unlike the woes I experienced with the original VII a few weeks after launch. It was a bit surprising the original Radeon VII failed especially without having done any over-clocking to it (granted was pushed very hard for a few weeks with all of my benchmarking workloads), but whatever the case, this retail Radeon VII is working out fine on Ubuntu 19.04 and various kernel/Mesa upgrades.
In this article are fresh benchmarks of the following graphics cards when tested using the newest Linux 5.1 + Mesa 19.2-devel drivers on the Radeon cards and the NVIDIA 430.09 driver on the GeForce GPUs under test.
- Radeon RX Vega 64
- Radeon VII
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- GeForce RTX 2070
- GeForce RTX 2080
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- GeForce TITAN RTX
A variety of OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming tests were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Making this round of tests even more interesting is having new benchmark-friendly Windows games like DiRT Rally 2.0 and Strange Brigade now working nicely on Linux under Steam Play with DXVK / Proton that has matured very nicely in recent months since the February launch of the Radeon VII.
Following all the raw Linux gaming benchmark results are also some current retail performance-per-dollar metrics for those considering these high-end gaming graphics cards.