Windows 10 Creators Update vs. Ubuntu 17.04 Linux Radeon Gaming Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 26 April 2017 at 03:00 PM EDT. Page 7 of 7. 36 Comments.
Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 vs. Git Linux Radeon Graphics

The Radeon RX 580 results under Linux for Tomb Raider appear particularly low. At least with the Radeon R9 Fury the results under Linux are narrowing with Windows compared to past comparisons, but still Windows 10 with Radeon Software is 35% faster than the latest AMDGPU+RadeonSI code.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 vs. Git Linux Radeon Graphics

Tomb Raider with ultimate quality settings showed the R9 Fury results on Mesa 17.2-dev getting closer to Radeon Software on Windows 10 Creators update.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 17.04 vs. Git Linux Radeon Graphics

The Total War: WARHAMMER game has a Direct3D 12 renderer option on Windows and ends up being slightly faster than the default D3D11 render. While the Radeon Linux graphics stack continues improving, there is still a noticeable difference in performance due to the overhead of this Linux game port.

While Ubuntu Linux continues trailing Microsoft Windows 10 in a number of these modern game tests, the results are much closer than we have seen in past Windows vs. Linux comparisons on Phoronix. With the tests of Unigine Superposition/Valley/Heaven show that the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack is now to competing with Radeon Software on Windows when it comes to OpenGL, but generally it's the overhead of these Linux game ports that results in a noticeable and often significant hit to performance. It's great to see the continued progress of the Radeon Linux graphics stack especially thanks to AMD and also Valve investing significantly into this open-source code. Hopefully later in 2017 we'll see better Linux gaming performance if the quality of the ports improve thanks to Vulkan and if AMD is able to open-source their long-awaited Vulkan driver code.

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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.