Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics Continue With Open-Source Driver & Crazy Fast Compared To RPi 4

Simply put, the graphics with the Raspberry Pi 5 are a hell of an upgrade. For YQuake2 as a heavily modified open-source game derived from the original Quake II codebase, it had troubles hitting above 90 FPS while with the Raspberry Pi 5 was now running with over a 230 FPS average.

In some YQuake2 configurations it now meant a playable frame-rate with the Raspberry Pi 5 with over four times faster performance.

With the GLMark2 OpenGL benchmark the Raspberry Pi 5 was at 4.3x the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4.

The Vulkan compute performance was also numerous times faster with the Raspberry Pi 5 than the Raspberry Pi 4.

I'll have more Raspberry Pi 5 GPU benchmarks in the days/weeks ahead, just had only a short amount of time so far with the Raspberry Pi 5 benchmarking, among all my other daily Linux testing and news coverage.

So while I focused on the CPU benchmarks in the Raspberry Pi 5 review, the graphics are just as captivating. The Raspberry Pi 5 VideoCore VII continues in the open-source driver tradition of prior generations and the patches have already been published. The Raspberry Pi 5 graphics are a mind-blowing improvement for a generational difference. Across various OpenGL and Vulkan workloads the Raspberry Pi 5 graphics are looking great. The one nit-pick I have is waiting until release day before publishing the hardware enablement patches, which in turn mean ultimately months before appearing in a released Linux kernel and Mesa version. Raspberry Pi OS is going to ship the support patched in but the lack of upstream support pre-launch may hurt the other Linux distributions that also target Raspberry Pi users unless they also end up carry these yet-to-be-merged patches. In any event dealing with the Raspberry Pi 5 thus far has been great fun with the enormous performance lift.