Radeon Software 21.30 PRO vs. Mesa 21.3-devel + Linux 5.15 Gaming Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 6 October 2021 at 09:16 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 29 Comments.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider as the newest Linux game port by Feral Interactive saw a very tight race and the PRO driver stack collecting some minor wins over the Mesa driver.

Strange Brigade that runs on Linux via Steam Play but has a native Vulkan renderer was seeing the faster performance out of the AMD PRO driver.

This round of cross-driver AMD Radeon Linux benchmarking was quite close using the latest public Radeon Software for Linux driver and then the latest upstream Linux 5.15 + Mesa 21.3-devel state. This testing was done on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS where the Radeon Software driver is officially supported where as running their PRO Vulkan driver on newer distributions like Ubuntu 21.04/21.10 currently has some known Wayland issues leading to lower performance there and the like. In any case these results continue to show that overall this open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver is still healthy competition against the official PRO driver and generally ranged from similar performance to favoring RADV even with the latest-generation RDNA2 GPUs.

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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.