RADV+ACO Outperforming AMDVLK, AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan Drivers For X-Plane 11.50 Flight Simulator

Released this month was the X-Plane 11.50 beta flight simulator that introduced a Vulkan renderer for this cross-platform, realistic flight simulator that long relied upon an OpenGL pipeline. Last week we published OpenGL vs. Vulkan X-Plane 11 benchmarks for both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics. In this article is a look at the X-Plane 11.50 beta Vulkan performance across the different Radeon Vulkan driver options.

As outlined last week, X-Plane 11.50 on Radeon with the Mesa RADV driver performs quite well with the ACO compiler back-end and that was how the comparison was facilitated last week on the AMD GPUs. When using the default AMDGPU LLVM back-end, the shader compile times were dreadfully slow that effectively rendered it useless.

For today's comparison is a look at the RADV+ACO performance on Mesa 20.1-devel compared to AMDVLK 2020.Q1.4 as the latest official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver. Additionally, AMDGPU-PRO 19.50 Vulkan was also tested as the latest proprietary Vulkan driver release that is similar to their Windows Vulkan driver with using their proprietary shader compiler back-end. AMD hasn't released a new Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO release now since the 19.50 release for Linux at the end of 2019.

Through testing these three different AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver combinations, the Linux 5.6.0 kernel was used for the latest AMDGPU DRM driver. The Radeon RX Vega 56 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards were tested on the three driver options.

For putting the AMD Vulkan performance into perspective are also numbers from the NVIDIA side with their latest Linux driver while re-testing the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1080, RTX 2060, and RTX 2060 SUPER.