AMD GPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenCL Compute Performance

Following this week's AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks, you may be wondering about the performance of OpenCL GPGPU performance particularly around AMD's new hybrid Linux driver stack. So for your viewing pleasure today are some OpenCL benchmarks on AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware using the newest drivers.

From the same system as the OpenGL/Vulkan comparison earlier in the week is now an OpenCL compute comparison. The AMD graphics cards used were the Radeon R9 285, Radeon R9 290, and Radeon R9 Fury. With having access to more NVIDIA graphics cards, the GeForce cards tested were the GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and GTX TITAN X.

The AMD GPU-PRO Linux beta driver in its current form supports OpenCL 2.0. This hybrid driver's OpenCL 2.0 support is much better than the current Clover-based OpenCL compute in the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers with being limited to OpenCL 1.1 and not many test cases even running. With the NVIDIA 364.12 Linux beta driver, OpenCL 1.2 support is currently exposed to complement NVIDIA's own CUDA 8.0 API.

All of the OpenCL benchmarks done for this quick comparison were run in a fully-automated and reproducible comparison using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.