Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Performance For July 2021

Besides Shadow of the Tomb Raider, one of the only other scenarios where AMDVLK was winning or neck-and-neck with RADV was Strange Brigade. Strange Brigade runs on Linux via Steam Play (Proton) but with native Vulkan rendering support. Across these 4K tests on the RX 6800 XT, the performance was very close between drivers.

When running The Talos Principle as the original Vulkan-powered game, AMDVLK's performance nosedived compared to RADV.

With Total War: Three Kingdoms as one of the Vulkan-powered Linux game ports by Feral Interactive the AMDVLK performance was at least in the same ball park as RADV.

Basemark is one of the Vulkan workloads really enjoying extra performance out of the new NGG culling option for RADV. AMDVLK also is competitive with RADV in this non-game benchmark.

For the Radeon RX 6800 XT as well as what we continue seeing out of older Radeon GPUs, the Mesa RADV option continues serving as a much better open-source AMD Vulkan driver than the company's own AMDVLK for most Linux gaming purposes. There are a few exceptions in some games, but overall the RADV driver tends to perform better and more reliable thanks to all of the work by Valve contractors and others on driving this Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver forward.