Of the many interesting findings from this morning's AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review was how the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack with OpenGL actually outperforms AMDGPU-PRO driver, the hybrid Radeon Linux driver relying upon AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver that's also shared with the Windows OpenGL driver. Here are more benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 showing the margins by which AMDGPU+RadeonSI can outperform AMDGPU-PRO.

Yesterday the embargo expired on showing you the Radeon RX Vega hardware, both the Vega 56 and Vega 64. While the embargo for sharing reviews and performance benchmarks for the Radeon RX Vega doesn't expire until tomorrow (Monday) when the hardware will become available, today I am providing a brief how-to guide for setting up both drivers (AMDGPU+RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO) for the RX Vega 56 / 64. So if you are hoping to buy a Radeon RX Vega tomorrow when they become available, this is what you can do today for getting your system(s) ready.

With earlier this week having delivered our very latest NVIDIA GeForce vs. Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan graphics benchmarks, I have now finished up the very latest OpenCL Linux compute numbers for both vendor's graphics cards on their latest drivers. Radeon cards were tested with their latest ROCm packages on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS while on the NVIDIA side was their long-lived 384.59 driver release.

With the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 shipping in two weeks, here are some benchmarks of the latest Radeon and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers with an assortment of modern GPUs. With these latest Linux GPU results are also the current performance-per-Watt and thermal metrics as recorded automatically via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. This Radeon vs. NVIDIA Linux comparison should be particularly interesting given the very good Mesa Git performance results posted yesterday that show RadeonSI performing well beyond the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL levels.

Mesa 17.2 will be officially released in one or two weeks, so here's a recap of all the improvements made to this open-source 3D Linux driver stack over the past quarter.

With this week's release of AMDGPU-PRO 17.30, here are some fresh benchmarks of this latest AMD hybrid Linux graphics driver release compared to using the newest pure open-source driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.13 development kernel and Mesa Git.

With the Linux 4.13 kernel currently under development there are new module parameters that can make it easier switching from the Radeon DRM default on GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs to instead using the newer AMDGPU DRM driver, but Radeon remains the default. Here's my test experiences and benchmark results of AMDGPU vs. Radeon for GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs.

With Mesa 17.2 due to be branched by the end of the week and thus place this quarterly update to Mesa under a feature freeze, here are some fresh benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI OpenGL driver on 17.2-dev compared to v17.1.4 stable as well as a few RADV Vulkan benchmarks too.

With Mesa's GL threading support ready for wider testing and the developers pursuing per-application enabling of this driver-agnostic Mesa OpenGL multi-threading work, here are some benchmarks of mesa_glthread when using a Pentium and Core i7 CPUs as well as a Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury.

Thanks to this week's Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD pushed out a new build of their hybrid driver stack for Linux, AMDGPU-PRO. This new release is marketed as AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 and is only found when looking for the Frontier driver, but it's been working out fine so far in my Polaris/Fiji GPU testing. Here are some benchmarks compared to their current stable series, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, as well as the newest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV driver stack.

With the Linux 4.13 merge window likely to open next week and the DRM-Next cutoff already having passed for new material that in turn wants to target 4.13, here are some initial benchmarks with a Polaris and Fiji graphics cards for this new AMDGPU DRM code.

Last week AMD released an updated AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with performance fixes so I've now carried out a fresh comparison of this updated 17.10-429170 driver compared to the latest open-source stack of Mesa 17.2-dev Git plus the Linux 4.12 development kernel.

Over the past few months we have seen some incredible progress made to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as AMDGPU (and the RADV Vulkan driver, though not the focus of today's article) as well as the Mesa 3D stack as a whole. The open-source Radeon Linux driver is much faster now than where it was last year and is becoming competitive with NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. For seeing how close the AMDGPU+RadeonSI stack is now to Windows, here are some fresh benchmarks.

GL_vs_VK is self-described as a "comparison of OpenGL and Vulkan API in terms of performance" and offers multiple test-cases for directly comparing OpenGL and Vulkan in different environments. Here are some benchmarks on several different drivers and GPUs.

This month will mark one year since the release of the Radeon 400 "Polaris" graphics cards. With the one year anniversary and also celebrating the 13th birthday of Phoronix, I ran some comparison tests showing the progress of the AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack over the better part of the past year using a Radeon RX 470 Polaris graphics card.

Our latest featured article this week in the lead-up to Phoronix's 13th birthday is a new OpenGL RadeonSI vs. Vulkan RADV driver comparison with six different Radeon graphics cards. This also features some older hardware tested making use of the experimental AMDGPU DRM driver, which is needed for RADV to work on more of the GCN card line-up.

After posting a number of NVIDIA GPU Linux benchmarks this week using their latest drivers, here is similar treatment on the Radeon side using their newest open-source driver code.

In yesterday's GeForce GT 1030 Linux review, a $70 USD graphics card that's low-profile and passively-cooled, I featured a number of NVIDIA VDPAU video acceleration benchmarks. But a question came up about Radeon VDPAU performance, so here are some benchmarks on that front, but they are far from ideal.

Given the RadeonSI/Gallium3D threaded pipe context work having landed earlier this week and there being other performance improvements with Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev, here are some fresh benchmarks on an AMD Polaris card comparing this latest open-source graphics driver code as of this week compared to AMD's latest hybrid driver, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10.

With the recent release of ROCm 1.5 followed by the ROCm OpenCL runtime finally being open-sourced, here are some fresh OpenCL benchmarks of this newer Radeon graphics compute stack.

While Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" was just released one month ago, by upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa you can already score measurable performance advantages if you are using AMD Radeon graphics.

With the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver recently hitting the milestone of effectively being Vulkan 1.0 compliant, I figured this warranted a good time for running a fresh open-source Vulkan vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance comparison on various graphics cards. For additional context, the RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL numbers are also present to provide additional value.

Last night well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olsak released a new patch series threading Gallium3D's pipe_context and initially is suitable for the RadeonSI driver. Given the performance gains he mentioned in the patch series, I was anxious to try out this new Gallium3D threading capability.

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.

A few days back I posted benchmarks of the initial GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 Nouveau 3D support. As expected, the performance was rather abysmal with re-clocking not being available for Pascal (or Maxwell) GPUs on this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver. For those trying to use Nouveau for Linux games or care about your GPU clock speeds, currently the GTX 600/700 "Kepler" series is still your best bet or the GTX 750 "Maxwell 1" is the last NVIDIA graphics processors not requiring signed firmware images and can properly -- but manually -- re-clock with the current Nouveau driver.

Given Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update earlier this month and the never-ending advancements to the open-source Linux graphics driver stack along with the recent release of Ubuntu 17.04, here are some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux when running a wide variety of cross-platform games with an AMD Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury graphics cards.

Last week I posted initial Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks and even AMDGPU overclocking results. That initial testing of this "Polaris Evolved" hardware was done with the fully-open Radeon driver stack that most Linux enthusiasts/gamers use these days. The AMDGPU-PRO driver wasn't tested for those initial articles as it seems to have a diminishing user-base and largely focused for workstation users. But for those wondering how AMDGPU-PRO runs with the Radeon RX 580, here are some comparison results to DRM-Next code for Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev.

One of the many features to look forward to with Linux 4.12 is the Nouveau DRM driver providing initial 3D/accelerated support for GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 "Pascal" graphics cards. Here are some benchmarks of this open-source NVIDIA driver support for these latest-generation GPUs compared to the proprietary driver.

Last week I began posting a number of AMD Radeon RX 580 Linux benchmarks but not covered so far has been the OpenCL compute performance considering the Clover-based compute stack isn't good enough for benchmarking and is basically unmaintained these days by AMD. Meanwhile, their ROCm stack is still being brought up and is not yet fully-opened nor optimized yet for performance. Thus for those with desktop cards looking for basic OpenCL support are left with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with its closed-source OpenCL driver. In this article are some fresh OpenCL benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO on the RX 580 and other Radeon GPUs compared to NVIDIA with its Linux OpenCL driver.

We are just a few weeks out from the release of Mesa 17.1 as the latest quarterly update to this important component to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack. With "Mesa 17.1" already having been mentioned in 102 Phoronix articles to date, here's a look at some of the most exciting changes and new features with Mesa 17.1.