While NVIDIA has been supporting Resizable BAR for a while now with their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, for those exclusively using Linux it remains more of a challenge due to AIB partners generally not releasing any vBIOS updates for ReBAR support that can be easily applied under Linux. But if you do carry out an update -- such as under Windows -- the performance uplift can be worthwhile if using a game that can benefit from the support.

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

Following last week's Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT / RX 6700 XT / RX 6800 XT graphics cards across all of the Vulkan driver options available to Linux users.

Given this week's launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT and that also bringing the new Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver, I was curious to see how the Vulkan ray-tracing performance compares now against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series on Linux.

With yesterday's launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it's the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD's closed-source "PRO" Vulkan driver distributed as part of the "Radeon Software for Linux" package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.

It's been a while since last looking at the performance of AMD's official "AMDVLK" open-source Linux Vulkan driver against that of the popular Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver. But here are some fresh benchmarks for those interested while using the latest-generation Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card paired with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel across testing both Vulkan drivers.

The newest performance optimization merged this week for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver is NGG culling for Navi 1x/2x graphics cards. NGG Culling "NGGC" isn't enabled by default at this time but can be easily activated and depending upon the software under test can provide some minor performance gains on top of all the other optimizations seen in recent times for RADV.

With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.

Since Crocus was merged into mainline Mesa last week we have been looking at benchmarks of this new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver designed exclusively for older Intel graphics hardware (i965 Gen4 through Haswell Gen7, plus Cherrvyiew and experimental Gen8 Broadwell) compared to the existing open-source i965 classic driver. Prior articles have looked at the quite good performance with Haswell while Sandy Bridge is in somewhat rough shape. Today's testing is going in the middle and looking at the Crocus vs. i965 OpenGL driver performance for Ivy Bridge with the once great Core i7 3770K.

Merged this past week was Crocus as the new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver developed by the community and used for Gen4/i965 through Gen7/Haswell generations of Intel graphics. This week I ran some Crocus benchmarks on Intel Haswell comparing against the existing i965 classic Mesa DRI driver while in this article are some comparison driver benchmarks using Intel Sandy Bridge graphics for those still running those once popular processors.

A few days ago I wrote about GravityMark as a new cross-API GPU benchmark from a former Unigine developer. Being curious about the Linux GPU driver performance for this benchmark that is focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support, I ran some benchmarks on the latest NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards with this benchmark for OpenGL and Vulkan.

Back in March NVIDIA announced they would be supporting the GeForce RTX 30 series with Resizable BAR support via a video BIOS update for supported systems. Recently I've been looking at the performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 once flashing the graphics card under Linux with Resizable BAR support and the performance is quite compelling for Vulkan-based games where this functionality is working.

Landing this week in Mesa 21.2's development code is Crocus Gallium3D providing a new Intel OpenGL driver for i964 "Gem4" through Haswell "Gen7" graphics. While even Haswell graphics are showing their age these days, I couldn't help but to fire up a few benchmarks seeing how this new Crocus open-source OpenGL driver performs against the existing "i965" classic open-source driver for Linux systems.

Following the recent RTX 30 series Linux gaming benchmarks and RTX 30 compute comparison, I was curious how the Linux performance for the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card compares to the Windows 10 performance in various GPU compute workloads. Well, here are those benchmarks for those wondering about Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA / OptiX compute performance between Windows and Linux with the very latest NVIDIA drivers.

With today's Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 packaged driver release is the first time Vulkan ray-tracing is being exposed on Linux for AMD Radeon graphics cards with any of the multiple driver options. Here are some initial benchmarks looking at how the Radeon RX 6000 series Vulkan ray-tracing performance is on Linux compared to NVIDIA's Vulkan ray-tracing support with the existing RTX 20/30 series hardware.

Landing in Mesa 21.1 on Friday was a variable rate shading (VRS) override for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver for providing significant performance boosts by effectively rendering less. This feature is limited to RDNA2 graphics processors while here are some benchmarks on what it means for 4K gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards on Linux.

Recently working on some fresh tests using the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver stack against the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver code in its newest form, here are some fresh benchmarks for this latest round of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming tests.

When it comes to the AMDGPU kernel driver changes in Linux 5.12 for modern open-source AMD Radeon graphics, most notable is RDNA2 OverDrive overclocking support now being available as well as AMDGPU FreeSync over HDMI (pre-HDMI 2.1). But from initial testing the new in-development kernel is showing mostly subtle performance improvements for the Radeon RX 6800 series over Linux 5.11.

RADV is a Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs that is part of the Mesa project and installed on most Linux distros out of the box. Our goal is to deliver a stable and performant driver to Linux gamers, and recently we've made our own shader compiler called ACO. To create the best possible experience, we'd like to take it a step further and ask our users for some testing and feedback.

With Mesa 21.0 releasing soon here is a look at the new features for this quarter's release of these open-source Vulkan / OpenGL driver implementations.

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa on a nice upward trajectory with most recently now having the backing of a Valve contract developer and a focus on getting the backlog of patches to this Gallium3D code upstreamed, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at where the performance currently stands when using Zink atop the RADV Vulkan driver compared to using the native RadeonSI driver with this round of testing from a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers of Mesa's RADV and AMD's official AMDVLK are competing as we start the new year, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance for various Linux games (native and via Steam Play with DXVK) as well as Vulkan compute tests.

While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers compare to the Radeon Software Windows drivers for the recently released Radeon RX 6800 XT, here are some preliminary data points looking at the OpenGL / Vulkan performance between Windows and Linux for RDNA 2.

Last week we delivered AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT Linux benchmarks and the performance was great both for Linux gaming as well as the OpenCL compute performance. But for as good as those Big Navi numbers were on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, they are now even better.

Intel today is announcing their Server GPU for the data center based on their Xe-LP microarchitecture with an initial focus on high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming. For as exciting as the Intel Server GPU is, some exciting Intel Linux graphics driver details were also disclosed.

With having added Tencent's NCNN tests to the Phoronix Test Suite with Vulkan acceleration, here is a look at the real-world impact by using RealSR-NCNN for scaling up with RealSR. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested for this initial NCNN / RealSR-NCNN Vulkan comparison.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with its ACO back-end by default is now winning nearly across the board against not only AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver with LLVM back-end but also AMDGPU-PRO with the proprietary shader compiler back-end.

As part of re-testing all hardware prior to major GPU/driver launches, here is a look at the latest NVIDIA OpenCL/CUDA performance on Linux -- complementing the recent Blender 2.90 benchmarks and the latest NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux gaming performance. In still waiting to find out when we will get any NVIDIA Ampere hardware for Linux testing, I have been having some benchmarking fun and extended this to a 24-way graphics card comparison back to Maxwell in looking at not only the raw GPU compute performance but also the performance-per-Watt / power consumption and GPU thermal values.

With last week having delivered some current NVIDIA Linux gaming performance metrics ahead of the anticipated GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series launch this week, here are some fresh compute metrics for those interested.