The Radeon RX Vega Performance With AMDGPU DRM-Next 4.21 vs. NVIDIA Linux Gaming

Given the AMDGPU changes building up for DRM-Next to premiere in Linux 4.21 that is on top of the AMDGPU performance boost with Linux 4.20, here are some benchmarks of Linux 4.19 vs. 4.20 Git vs. DRM-Next (Linux 4.21 material) with the Radeon RX Vega 64 compared to the relevant NVIDIA GeForce competition.

The Radeon RX Vega 64 tests were done with Linux 4.19.5, Linux 4.20 Git as of Saturday afternoon, and DRM-Next-4.21-WIP from Alex Deucher's Git tree as of Saturday for the latest Linux 4.21 material. The user-space drivers were Mesa 19.0-devel built against LLVM 8.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA. For judging the RX Vega 64 performance were the GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards as the closest competition to Vega. A fresh large graphics card comparison through the RTX 2080 series will be out in the next day or two. There will also be the Radeon RX 590 Linux review still once that graphics card is working appropriately with the driver stack.

The NVIDIA driver in use was 415.18 and all tests were done from the same Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box. All of these OpenGL and Vulkan Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.