AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 Pro/Open vs. Upstream Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan Radeon Benchmarks

Last week AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 hybrid driver featuring their latest optional proprietary Linux driver components as well as the "all-open" driver stack option. Here are some initial benchmarks of that driver stack compared to what's shipped by default in Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS as well as the latest upstream Mesa/AMDGPU support.

AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 was introduced with Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS support as well as for Ubuntu 16.04.5 and RHEL/CentOS 6.10 and 7.5. AMDGPU-PRO doesn't see new releases too often these days so also coming with 18.30 is the Radeon Pro WX 8200 graphics card support, CLI-based WattMan-like functionality, and other updates.

What's not readily advertised currently with AMDGPU-PRO driver releases are the driver version bits. AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 when using the PRO OpenGL driver support is based on an OpenGL 4.6.13536 release and their PRO Vulkan driver is based upon the AMDVLK/XGL sources but using still their proprietary shader compiler. On the open-source driver front, their RadeonSI and RADV driver components are based on Mesa 18.1.0-RC4 built against the LLVM 6.0.1 back-end. It's a pity they weren't able to pull in the latest Mesa 18.1 point releases, but there are plenty of other ways for Linux gamers/enthusiasts to fetch those packages. The Open/Pro driver options also ship with a DKMS-based AMDGPU kernel module to provide newer AMDGPU DRM support than what's found in the operating system's stock kernel -- with 18.30, it seems to be about at a Linux 4.17 upstream state.

With the Pro/Open options for OpenGL and Vulkan, that was compared to the stock Ubuntu 18.04.1 performance with the Linux 4.15 kernel and Mesa 18.0.5 built against LLVM 6.0.0. Additionally, a run was carried out using the Linux 4.18.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 18.3-dev built against LLVM 6.0.1 via the Oibaf PPA for the latest open-source upstream look.

All tests were done on the same Ubuntu box running the Phoronix Test Suite and testing each driver combination with a Radeon RX 580 (Polaris) and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.