Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux Gaming Performance With AMDGPU 5.3 + Mesa 19.2-devel

Now that the flow of initial Navi fixes and optimizations has settled down for both the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and the Mesa RADV/RadeonSI user-space driver components, here is a look at AMD Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics card performance on Ubuntu Linux at the end of July, now three weeks after these 7nm graphics cards first shipped.

This round of testing features the Navi Radeon RX 5700 series tested with the very latest Linux 5.3 development kernel as of this past weekend, which is the first kernel featuring this Navi support. Since the initial merge earlier this month, there have already been some Navi 10 fixes that followed. On the OpenGL/Vulkan driver side, Mesa 19.2-devel is branching in early August and now has decent support for the Radeon RX 5700 series in place. Since the earlier RadeonSI support and the RADV Vulkan driver support that landed on launch day, there has continued to be a number of fixes to land, various new features, and different driver performance optimizations.

For a while there were Navi/GFX10 commits to Mesa almost daily but now with that initial bring-up in good standing, I've been running the latest Git code paired with LLVM 9.0 SVN over the past number of days. Overall the Linux driver support when riding this latest code-base is in good shape. There still are some hangs to deal with one notable case being Rise of The Tomb Raider, but that's a known issue to the developers and they are currently pursuing workarounds. I've also experienced a few other hangs such in Batman: Arkham Origins with DXVK but overall the OpenGL and Vulkan support for the RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT is now good overall.

For those not comfortable building these low-level driver components from source, they should be found in the autumn Linux distribution updates like Fedora 31 and Ubuntu 19.10 with the Linux 5.3 kernel and Mesa 19.2 components reaching stable in the September time-frame.

For comparing the NVIDIA performance, various cards were tested while using its NVIDIA 430.26 stable driver. The graphics cards tested for this comparison included:

- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- RX Vega 64
- Radeon VII
- RX 5700
- RX 5700 XT
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1080
- GTX 1080 Ti
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX

The graphics cards tested were based upon the relevant cards I had available; sadly no RTX SUPER coverage as NVIDIA apparently has been uninterested in the SUPER graphics cards on Linux. All of these cards were tested from the Intel Core i9 9900K system with ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard, 16GB of RAM, Samsung 970 EVO 250GB, and running Ubuntu 19.04 with the various kernel/driver modifications.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite various Linux native and Steam Play gaming benchmarks were carried out. Now that the Navi Linux support is better stabilized and approaching stable releases for the necessary driver components, expect more Radeon RX 5700 tests over the weeks ahead.