Raven Ridge With The Ryzen 5 2400G On Mesa 18.2 + Linux 4.17 Is Finally Stable

Depending upon the motherboard and other factors, the Raven Ridge Linux support has been a bit of a mess since its February launch. Fortunately, with time various Linux driver fixes have landed for improving the stability and performance of these APUs with Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics. During my recent testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, it was completely stable and running fine with the newest open-source driver code but the Ryzen 3 2200G was still a stability nightmare.

Since buying the Raven Ridge hardware back at launch, it's been disappointing the number of Linux problems encountered and judging by forum posts and other messages from readers, I've been far from alone in the initial display issues that were then rectified with Linux 4.16 and for some still stability problems. When firing up the latest round of tests on Linux 4.17 with Mesa 18.2-dev, the Ryzen 5 2400G paired with an ASUS PRIME B350M-E motherboard on the very latest BIOS (4011) has been working great with no issues to speak of at all with my testing. Finally I am happy with the state of that system using the latest BIOS and newest AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV driver components.

But with the Ryzen 3 2200G box and the MSI B350M GAMING PRO motherboard using its latest BIOS (2.G0) and the same Linux stack, it's been a stability wreck. I haven't been able to run Vulkan or OpenGL games more than a few minutes without stability problems. But it doesn't appear to be a thermal issue or any general hardware issue as I can pound that same system for hours with CPU benchmarks without the system running into any stability woes, it just falls off the wagon when engaging the Vega 8 graphics processor.

So for today's article are just fresh Raven Ridge benchmark results with the Ryzen 5 2400G. As a refresher, the Ryzen 5 2400G is a quad-core part with eight threads, 3.6GHz base clock, 3.9GHz maximum boost clock, 11 Vega compute units, and has a 65 Watt TDP. Currently this APU is retailing for just over $160 USD. The Ryzen 5 2400G test system was paired with DDR4-3200 memory.

For seeing how well the integrated graphics are working out, I compared the performance to an AMD A10-7870K box as well as an Intel Core i7 5775C with the legendary Iris Pro 6200 graphics and then also an Intel Core i7 8700K Coffeelake system with the UHD Graphics 630.

During this testing all of the systems had the same software stack with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 while upgrading to the Linux 4.17 Git kernel as of 16 May and using the Mesa 18.2-devel stack from the Oibaf PPA. The performance CPU frequency scaling governor was manually forced during testing. A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite. What's worth pointing out with the A10-7870K tests is that it's using the AMDGPU DRM driver to offer Vulkan support and now it also was recently improved with Mesa 18.2 thanks to both render back-ends now being enabled.