Radeon RX 550: AMDGPU-PRO vs. DRM-Next + Mesa 17.2-dev

Earlier this week I posted a number of Radeon RX 550 Linux benchmarks making use of AMD's popular open-source driver stack. For those wondering how the open-source driver compares to the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid proprietary driver for this sub-$100 Polaris GPU, these benchmarks will interest you.

The focus of today's testing with the Gigabyte Radeon RX 550 2GB is comparing the AMDGPU-PRO performance to the open-source driver. The latest AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 public driver was used for the hybrid testing while the pure open-source testing was done with the DRM-Next material for the Linux 4.12 kernel paired with Mesa 17.2-dev Git as of Thursday built against LLVM 5.0 SVN.

Tests in this article are focused on the OpenGL performance as when the testing began, the Polaris 12 GPU support hadn't yet landed in the RADV Vulkan driver. But fresh Vulkan tests will be coming up in another article. All of the benchmarks were automated via the Phoronix Test Suite.