Radeon Vulkan Driver Added To Mesa, Fresh Radeon Vulkan vs. OpenGL Benchmarks + AMDGPU-PRO

Next is the only other AAA Vulkan Linux game right now, The Talos Principle.

While Mesa was faster than AMDGPU-PRO for OpenGL rendering with Dota 2, AMDGPU-PRO was faster for rendering The Talos Principle with Dota 2. All four tested GPUs showed AMDGPU-PRO's OpenGL driver being significantly faster than Mesa 12.1-dev Git.

With the Vulkan renderer, the AMDGPU-PRO stack was much faster than RADV. The AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan results were much faster than AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL results for this game while given the early state of RADV the open-source Vulkan performance was slower than the mature OpenGL driver.

Now the 4K results for Talos Principle with the two graphics renderers:

AMDGPU-PRO remained faster for both OpenGL and Vulkan rendering. The open-source OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance at 4K was about the same to slightly slower with RADV while AMDGPU-PRO shows there is potential for faster Vulkan rendering performance over OpenGL once this new Vulkan driver matures.

Well, those are the results as of today with RADV code scheduled to land in mainline Mesa. The results show that the RADV Vulkan driver is slower than the RadeonSI OpenGL performance in the same games, but the RADV developers acknowledge there are still more performance optimizations and Vulkan features to implement. Still, the driver has come quite far for only being started this summer by two open-source developers without the support of AMD. It will be interesting to see how far they can take RADV and hopefully when AMD begins contributing to the project and/or open-sourcing their existing Vulkan code. Aside from the Vulkan results, the other exciting take-away was seeing how RadeonSI Gallium3D's OpenGL performance is now outperforming the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL driver!

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