Another Look At The Maturing AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series Linux Performance

With the AMD Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux driver support maturing and the early optimizations/fixes and lingering feature work now calming down for the Linux 5.3 kernel and within RadeonSI/RADV for the imminent branching of Mesa 19.2, here is another look at how the Navi performance stands today compared to AMD Vega graphics cards and the high-end NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards.

This newest round of AMD Navi benchmarking was done with the latest Mesa 19.2-devel Git code at the end of last week along with the newest Linux 5.3 Git kernel state and the LLVM 9.0 AMDGPU compiler back-end. These various open-source Linux software components roughly correlate to how the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series Linux support is looking for reaching stable around September and what will be found in the likes of Ubuntu 19.10, Fedora Workstation 31, and other autumn Linux distribution releases.

Besides the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, the other graphics cards tested for this comparison (based upon the GPUs I had available) were:

- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64
- Radeon VII
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- GeForce RTX 2060
- GeForce RTX 2070
- GeForce RTX 2080
- GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

All of the AMD graphics cards were freshly re-tested atop this bleeding edge Linux graphics driver stack. The NVIDIA cards were also freshly re-tested, which in their case was using the latest NVIDIA 430.40 binary driver.

All of these OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks on the assortment of tested GPUs were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.