Radeon Linux OpenGL Driver Continues Giving Its Best Against Windows 10

With having around a Windows 10 installation this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux benchmarking, I also carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon gaming performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux using the very latest drivers on each platform. This time around a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 were used for this benchmarking.

From the Core i7 8700K box, AMD Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards when tested with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro x64 having all available system updates as of 19 February and then again under Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS with all available updates plus some driver upgrades.

On Windows the Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.2 release was used.

From the Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS base, for getting the bleeding-edge open-source driver stack, the Linux 4.15~4.16 kernels were used as well as Mesa 18.1-dev built against LLVM 7.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA. The RX 580 was tested with the Linux 4.16 Git kernel as the bleeding-edge AMDGPU support and with all the latest performance optimizations. The Radeon RX Vega 64 had to be tested with Linux 4.15.4 as an AMDGPU DC regression appeared in the Linux Git code and botched the mode-setting process on the RX Vega 64. But falling back to Linux 4.15 stable allowed the display to work just fine and the testing could proceed.

Tested on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux were a variety of gaming tests as well as a few more synthetic tests. First up are some basic OpenGL game tests known to be of similar quality under Windows and Linux and not ports. Following that are all of the popular Linux game tests that happen to be ports on Steam for Linux like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, GRID Autosport, Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, and Total War: WARHAMMER. There aren't Vulkan tests in this article but will be in a future article due to limited time and needing to test some of these games manually.