More Benchmarks Showing How Gallium3D With RX Vega Smacks AMDGPU-PRO's OpenGL Proprietary Driver

Of the many interesting findings from this morning's AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review was how the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack with OpenGL actually outperforms AMDGPU-PRO driver, the hybrid Radeon Linux driver relying upon AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver that's also shared with the Windows OpenGL driver. Here are more benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 showing the margins by which AMDGPU+RadeonSI can outperform AMDGPU-PRO.

This evening I finished up running some more tests of AMDGPU-PRO 17.30 with its launch-day driver on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS. Compared was then the current "pure open-source" results via the amd-staging-4.12 kernel with Mesa 17.3 + LLVM 6 SVN from the Padoka PPA. The Mesa/LLVM build is slightly newer by a few days as well compared to the testing in the Radeon RX Vega Linux review.

Cheers to AMD's Linux developers for such an open-source accomplishment that's never been seen before with such open-source support at-launch for a new GPU architecture.

Both the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 were tested on these two AMD Linux graphics driver stacks. A variety of OpenCL benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite, including some new/different tests to the launch day review. When the RADV Vulkan driver matures for Vega, there will be a similar open vs. closed comparison on that front too.

Anyhow, for those wanting to see the open-source Radeon driver whoop the hybrid proprietary driver, which just a few years ago many thought would be impossible, continue reading... And, yes, both drivers support OpenGL 4.5 and there were no real rendering issues spotted unless otherwise noted.