NVIDIA Linux Vulkan Performance vs. RADV / AMDGPU-PRO

While running Dota 2 on modern graphics cards at 1080p leads to a fairly CPU bound scenario, the results show the NVIDIA OpenGL driver achieves a higher frame-rate than the AMD Radeon Mesa and AMDGPU-PRO drivers. The GTX 960 and GTX 970 outliers were just due to a higher standard deviation in the results due to one of their runs crashing while on subsequent runs the performance was in line with the other cards. These numbers basically show that the AMDGPU-PRO and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers have more work to do on reducing the overhead of their driver compared to the NVIDIA binary driver.

The first look at the NVIDIA Vulkan performance against the new RADV driver and the AMDGPU-PRO proprietary code... All of the NVIDIA results were faster than the AMD numbers. Even the GTX 950 with Vulkan was faster than the R9 Fury and RX 480 on either driver stack.

The Dota 2 OpenGL 4K results. As mentioned in the previous article, RADV was running into issues at 4K so there is no Vulkan data to show for this quick article. The OpenGL results show that the GTX 780 Ti / GTX 970 and greater is faster than all of the AMD cards tested (including the RX 480 and R9 Fury) on either AMD Linux driver stack.

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver is doing fairly well for being so young and should be within striking distance of the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver in the months ahead as more performance optimizations are achieved and hopefully AMD open-sourcing some of their long-promised Vulkan code. But the Dota 2 Vulkan result shows at least that the NVIDIA proprietary driver is still faster with even a GTX 950 beating out the RX 480 / R9 Fury on either driver. But on the NVIDIA GeForce side there is currently no option for having an open-source Vulkan driver. The OpenGL tests in this article also show that there still are more performance optimizations needed to AMDGPU-PRO as well as the Mesa 12.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN + Linux 4.8 open-source stack. More OpenGL/Vulkan tests coming up after the weekend.

If you missed Thursday's article, see more RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan benchmarks via that earlier article.