AMDGPU-PRO vs. RadeonSI/RADV & NVIDIA's Linux Drivers To End 2016

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 28 December 2016 at 11:31 AM EST. Page 1 of 11. 44 Comments.

Last week I published a 31-way Linux graphics card comparison with an assortment of both NVIDIA GeForce and Radeon graphics cards using the latest Linux drivers. I also published a variety of Vulkan benchmarks. In those tests the open-source Radeon driver stack was used given that's what AMD is endorsing these days for Linux gamers with AMDGPU-PRO not even working on all modern Linux distributions. But for those curious how AMDGPU-PRO compares to those big result data-sets, here are those -PRO results to share today.

In this article are AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 (the latest public hybrid driver release) compared to all of last week's data looking at the OpenGL and Vulkan results on the NVIDIA 375.26 and AMDGPU/Radeon+R600g/RadeonSI driver stacks. These tests were done with Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS for the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 results due to this hybrid driver not yet officially supporting Ubuntu 16.10, which is the OS used for last week's tests while having upgraded to Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13.1-dev when running the open-source AMD results.

With AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 there is experimental GCN 1.0 / 1.1 support, but with GCN 1.0 the experience was too unstable outside of OpenCL workloads that those older cards weren't tested for this comparison. The Radeon graphics cards tested with the AMDGPU-PRO driver were the R7 260X, R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. That's on top of all of the cards tested last week that have full support atop the open-source driver stack Radeon HD 4890, HD 5830, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7750, HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 285, R7 370, RX 460, RX 470, RX 480, and R9 Fury plus the FirePro V8750/V8800. Though when it comes to the Vulkan results, only the newer GCN cards are compatible with either Vulkan driver (AMDGPU-PRO or RADV).

The NVIDIA cards tested with 375.26 were the GTX 460, GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080.

All tests were done with the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard, 16GB DDR4, 256GB NVMe SSD, and swapping out the many different graphics cards. All of these OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks for this article were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. And yes, this is a rather big article with all of the graphics cards tested and in the case of AMD also having to test two drivers. If you wish to see this entire article ad-free and all on a single page for easy viewing, join Phoronix Premium to enjoy these benefits while helping to support all of our Linux hardware testing.


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