The Current RADV+ACO Mesa Driver Performance For February 2020

As it's been a few weeks since last running a Mesa open-source driver comparison on AMD Radeon graphics hardware, here are some fresh Mesa 20.1-devel benchmarks just a few weeks so far after the Mesa 20.0 branching. These latest Mesa 20.1-devel benchmarks were also run a second time when enabling the RADV ACO shader compiler back-end that's been a focus by Valve developers in enhancing the Linux gaming experience. These results are compared to Mesa 19.2.8 as a baseline for the open-source driver support offered out-of-the-box by Ubuntu 19.10.

The graphics cards tested this round include the Radeon RX 590, RX Vega 64, RX 5600 XT, and RX 5700 XT. The tested software configurations were Mesa 19.2.8 (the default of Ubuntu 19.10), Mesa 20.1-dev as the latest Git state as of a few days ago, and then the same Mesa 20.1-dev revision but enabling the RADV ACO back-end. The Linux 5.5.5 kernel was used throughout all of the driver testing and no other changes made to the system besides the GPU swapping and Mesa configuration.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of Linux gaming benchmarks predominantly Vulkan tests were carried out. Coming up will also be some fresh AMDVLK Vulkan driver comparison tests and a look at how the Linux 5.6 AMDGPU performance is shaping up.