Radeon RX Vega Performance With Mesa 17.3-dev + LLVM 6 + drm-next-4.15-dc
Ending out September is the very exciting news that AMDGPU DC display code will likely land in Linux 4.15. Out of this excitement of finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel with modern Radeon GPUs supporting HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting, and more. I decided to see how well this "drm-next-4.15-dc" code is working out for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, where attached monitors can finally be driven by this DC code rather than having to rely upon AMDGPU-PRO or other kernel branches. So for ending out this exciting month, here are some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 / RX Vega 64 and other Radeon GPUs using this kernel paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git built against LLVM 6.0 SVN compared to various NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.
If you are wanting to try out this yet-to-be-merged AMDGPU DC branch prior to the Linux 4.15 merge window, for Ubuntu users I have spun this x86_64 kernel for easy testing. This is the same kernel build I used for this newest round of AMD graphics Linux testing. That atop Ubuntu 17.04 was paired with the Padoka PPA to provide Mesa 17.3-dev and LLVM 6.0 as of this week. For testing was the Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 off this bleeding-edge open-source stack. The latest linux-firmware.git microcode blobs are also needed for working Vega support.
The RX Vega testing has been going well and stable with the aforementioned software stack. The only RadeonSI/RADV issues to report is that Metro Last Light Redux occasionally still has Vega issues and Dawn of War III was also hitting stability issues during loading, but had worked fine on pre-GFX9 hardware with the same stack.
On the NVIDIA side with the 384.90 Linux driver the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti were compared. I'll also have a larger Linux GPU comparison on Phoronix next week with the lower-end/mid-range cards for those interested. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were executed.