The AMD Radeon RX Vega Launch Performance Compared To 2019 Linux Drivers

First up was the DiRT Rally Linux game port that ran well on the 2017 drivers. Even with this being an older Linux game, the RX Vega 56 performance since launch improved by 6% while the RX Vega 64 was up by 4%. The RX Vega 56 on the current Linux driver stack now roughly matches where the performance was for the RX Vega 64 at launch in 2017.

With the older DiRT Showdown game as a more profound difference with the Vega performance up by about 13% since the original Vega launch.

The Talos Principle with its OpenGL renderer saw about a 10% performance boost since the Vega launch for both models.

The Talos Principle Vulkan performance was much more profound with the RADV Linux driver performance improving by 36% during this time period. Additionally, the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance started out about the same but now the Vulkan performance for this game is much greater than the RadeonSI OpenGL numbers.

The HITMAN Linux game port on OpenGL is about 8% faster compared to launch.

The system power consumption is also interesting to note with the better PowerPlay power management code merged into the AMDGPU driver. The minimum power consumption in between the multiple game runs dipped 10~20 Watts lower during the "idle" periods while even under load with the original launch driver the power consumption was basically stuck at its peak at launch while with the latest Linux kernel the Vega GPUs seem to be hitting more of their mid performance states while still delivering better performance than the launch driver.

When pushing HITMAN harder with ultra quality settings, the RX Vega performance was still up by 12%.

When looking at the system power consumption in this more demanding game configuration, the minimum/idle power usage was still measurably lower while the average power consumption was comparable to the 2017 state.