AMD GPU-PRO Hybrid Linux OpenGL Performance vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D

While still working on some AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Linux driver benchmarks using AMD's new hybrid driver with Vulkan support, for your viewing pleasure this morning are some benchmarks comparing the new AMD GPU-PRO driver with its binary OpenGL driver against the pure open-source driver stack with the Ubuntu 16.04 AMDGPU driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D from Mesa 11.2 + LLVM 3.8.

As mentioned in Trying The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu With Vulkan, OpenCL and OpenGL, AMD hasn't yet done much tuning to their new AMD GPU-PRO OpenGL implementation with much of their time so far being focused on their new Vulkan driver support. However, out of curiosity and reader requests, this weekend I did some tests of OpenGL on AMD GPU-PRO against the pure open-source stack as is going to be shipped by Ubuntu 16.04. The AMDGPU-supported cards I tested on included the Radeon R9 285 (Tonga) and Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji). The AMD GPU-PRO driver also supports the GCN 1.1 Sea Islands hardware as its DKMS driver has enabled this feature, but that was left out from the quick, initial round of testing.

On the following pages are these initial OpenGL results comparing the AMD GPU-PRO beta stack release from Friday compared to what's planned by default for Ubuntu 16.04: the Linux 4.4 kernel (with AMDGPU back-ports from 4.5) and Mesa 11.2 built against LLVM 3.8. OpenCL and Vulkan tests are forthcoming. All of these benchmarks were facilitated in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Keep in mind that aside from performance differences, AMD GPU-PRO offers OpenGL 4.5 while the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is present at OpenGL 4.1 compliance.