RADV Vulkan Gaming Getting Closer To RadeonSI OpenGL Performance

With the Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver having just landed a significant performance optimization you may be wondering whether RADV Vulkan now leads to faster gaming frame-rates than using the mature RadeonSI OpenGL driver... I was curious so I ran some fresh benchmarks using the newest Mesa Git code.

On a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 I ran fresh Mesa 17.4-dev benchmarks following the DCC improvements landing in RADV. That was built against LLVM 6.0 SVN and on the kernel side was Linux 4.15 Git.

Using Dota 2, Dawn of War 3, Mad Max, Serious Sam 3: BFE, and Talos Principle a range of OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks were carried out with these being the notable Linux-native games featuring both OpenGL and Vulkan rendering support. Tests were carried out with the Phoronix Test Suite.