How The Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi Linux Performance Has Evolved Since Launch

As part of our year-end articles we already provided benchmarks looking at the Radeon OpenGL / Vulkan driver performance for 2019. That testing was done using Polaris and Vega given their GPU support prior to 2019, but for those wondering about the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" performance for these GPUs that launched this summer, here are some end-of-year tests.

This comparison is looking at the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT performance for the August 2019 state of the Linux graphics driver compared to the latest driver state as of this week. The testing was done with the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X on ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and the reference Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

The initial results from our August 2019 testing were done on Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.3 kernel and Mesa 19.2.0-devel stack as of August. The end-of-the-year testing meanwhile was using Ubuntu 19.10 with the Linux 5.5 kernel and Mesa 20.0-devel via the Oibaf PPA.

Besides the updated software stack, an additional end-of-year run was carried out with the RADV Vulkan driver when enabling the ACO back-end that premiered in Mesa 19.3 and now works for Navi GPUs. The Valve-funded ACO back-end for the Radeon Vulkan driver can provide significant performance improvements in various Vulkan Linux native games as well as Steam Play titles.