The RadeonSI/RADV Linux Gaming Performance With Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 18.10

With Ubuntu 19.04 due for release next week, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon Linux gaming performance is looking out-of-the-box on the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" compared to the current Ubuntu 18.10 release.

Ubuntu 19.04 is shipping with the Linux 5.0 kernel and Mesa 19.0.1 driver stack, making for an up-to-date experience compared to Ubuntu 18.10 with Linux 4.18 and Mesa 18.2.8. The Mesa 19.0 stable release is great and contains a half-year worth of advancements compared to what was found in the Cosmic Cuttlefish, which is particularly beneficial for the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers that advanced a lot in these releases plus other ongoing OpenGL enhancements and other Mesa improvements. With the use of Linux 5.0 paired with Mesa 19.0, Ubuntu 19.04 has initial support for AMD FreeSync with OpenGL games using RadeonSI as another feature that is nice.

For seeing how the performance compares to Ubuntu 18.10, I ran some clean benchmarks on both Ubuntu Linux releases with Polaris and Vega graphics cards. The cards tested were the Radeon RX 580, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64. The RX 590 wasn't tested since it had problems with the firmware state of Ubuntu 18.10 while Radeon VII wasn't tested due to its support not being in order with 18.10 out-of-the-box.

All tests were done on the same Intel Core i9 9900K system with the MSI Radeon RX 580 and AMD Radeon RX Vega 56/64 graphics cards. A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux games were tested as well as a few other desktop/graphics applications. All of these benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.