Mesa 13.0 vs. 17.0 Performance For RADV/RadeonSI: Big Gains For Vulkan, OpenGL Boosts

The demanding Unigine Heaven performance was also unchanged under this newest Mesa series.

Furmark didn't see any real performance changes for RadeonSI on Mesa 13.0....

But the GpuTest triangle sub-test did end up seeing improved performance on Mesa 17.0. The GpuTest triangle test is usually a function of the GPU's video memory performance.

While there were Mesa 17.0 regressions found with Tesseract and an RX 460 OpenArena regression, aside from that the Mesa 17.0 RadeonSI performance was either the same -- or in many games, much faster than Mesa 13.0. Mesa 17.0 is a huge release with many significant performance improvements for RadeonSI particularly with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, ET: Legacy, and minor gains in other cases.

When it comes to the RADV Vulkan driver, the move from 13.0 to 17.0 is huge with Dota 2 and The Talos Principle showing much better performance across the board. Beyond the performance, RadeonSI in Mesa 17.0 now has OpenGL 4.5 exposed and there are other new features to Mesa 17.0.

Stay tuned for some similar Intel and Nouveau tests shortly as well as some Mesa 17.1-dev Git results after that for additional perspective where open-source Linux gaming performance is heading in the next couple of months. If you appreciate all of our Linux benchmarks, consider joining Phoronix Premium to enjoy ad-free viewing, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits.