Mesa 18.0/18.1/18.2 RadeonSI + RADV Benchmark Comparison With Radeon RX 580 / R9 Fury / RX Vega 64

For those currently making use of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with its default graphics stack (Linux 4.15 + Mesa 18.0) and are wondering if it makes sense upgrading to a newer version of the Linux kernel and/or Mesa, here is an extensive Mesa+AMDGPU comparison testing four graphics driver configurations across three popular AMD Radeon graphics cards.

With a Radeon RX 580 (Polaris), Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji), and Radeon RX Vega 64 (Vega), the following Linux graphics driver configurations were benchmarked:

- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver with its default Linux 4.15.0-23-generic kernel and Mesa 18.0.0-rc5 built against LLVM 6.0.

- Using the same Mesa 18.0 build but upgrading to the mainline Linux 4.17.3 kernel to see the impact of any kernel changes or particularly the newer AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver.

- Using Linux 4.17.3 with Mesa 18.1.3 as obtained via the Padoka Stable PPA (Pkppa) that is built against LLVM 6.0.

- Using Linux 4.17.3 with Mesa 18.2-devel as obtained via the Padoka PPA that also makes use of an LLVM 7.0 SVN snapshot for the newest AMDGPU compiler back-end code. This represents pretty much a bleeding-edge configuration. The Linux 4.18 AMDGPU state wasn't tested since with the latest Linux Git code, my RX Vega 56/64 graphics cards have display issues when the AMDGPU DRM driver is loaded.

All of these graphics cards and driver configurations were tested on the same Intel Core i7 8700K system with ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard, 16GB DDR4, 120GB Intel Optane SSD, and Dell P2415Q 4K display. A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.