Ubuntu 16.10 vs. 17.04 Radeon Graphics Performance

If you read enough Phoronix, you know that Mesa and the Linux kernel's DRM graphics drivers continue advancing at a remarkable pace, especially in recent times. Thus if you were an Ubuntu 16.10 user but planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, here are some benchmark results showing the performance improvements you can expect with the Radeon/AMDGPU DRM and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Plus there are also some results when using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 17.04 to show what more performance can be tapped by switching to Mesa 17.1-dev.

For this Ubuntu 17.04 launch day testing are results of Ubuntu 16.10 out-of-the-box compared to Ubuntu 17.04 out-of-the-box with running various Linux OpenGL gaming benchmarks. Ubuntu 16.10 shipped with the Linux 4.8 kernel, Mesa 12.0, and X.Org Server 1.18.4. Ubuntu 17.04 is on the newer Linux 4.10 kernel, Mesa 17.0, and X.Org Server 1.19.3. It's quite the bump over the past six months with Mesa 13.0 having not landed in time for Ubuntu 16.10. The third run for this article is when enabling the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 17.04 to show the upgrade to Mesa 17.1-dev Git.

AMD Radeon R9 270X, RX 480, and R9 Fury graphics cards were used for this Zesty Zapus launch-day benchmarking. More Ubuntu 17.04 graphics tests to come shortly. All benchmarking done via the Phoronix Test Suite.