With the RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to be advanced by Valve and other independent developers while AMD continues with open-source code drops of their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver, it's been a friendly open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance and feature/extension battle since that official AMD Vulkan driver was opened up at the end of last year. With new AMDVLK/XGL/PAL code drops happening about weekly and RADV continuing to receive new feature/performance work every few days, both drivers continue maturing gracefully as shown by our latest performance benchmarks.

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 396 Linux driver beta in the form of the 396.18 release and its biggest addition is a new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler to replace the compiler that's been hobbled together since the Vulkan 1.0 debut. Here are some fresh NVIDIA Vulkan Linux benchmarks and more on this new SPIR-V compiler.

The Khronos Group has today announced Vulkan 1.1 as the first major update to this high-performance graphics/compute API since the initial Vulkan 1.0 release two years ago. And it's thankfully a hard launch with multiple vendors putting out Vulkan 1.1 conformant drivers today.

Last month Intel open-sourced a new "NEO" OpenCL driver including an LLVM graphics compiler and its compute runtime supporting OpenCL 2.1. I finally found some time to give this new open-source Intel OpenCL Linux driver a try.

With having around a Windows 10 installation this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux benchmarking, I also carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon gaming performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux using the very latest drivers on each platform. This time around a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 were used for this benchmarking.

With the AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan driver that AMD open-sourced in December continuing to be updated in weekly batches with new Vulkan extensions / features / performance optimizations and the RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to march to its own beat, I have spent the past few days conducting some fresh benchmarks between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers with RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.

Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks of Mesa 18.0 on RADV/RadeonSI drivers for AMD GPUs now that feature development is over for this next quarterly installment of Mesa 3D. On the Radeon side there were mostly performance improvements to note with the RADV Vulkan driver, but what about on the Intel side? Today are benchmarks of the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compared to earlier Mesa releases for seeing how the Intel (U)HD Graphics performance has changed on the Linux desktop.

With Mesa 18.0 now well into its feature freeze and this quarterly update to Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers bringing many new features and improvements as covered in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview here are some benchmarks comparing the Mesa 18.0 RadeonSI/RADV driver performance to the current 17.3 stable series and the older 17.2 series as well.

Mesa 18.0 is currently being prepared for release by mid-February and is yet another feature-packaged, quarterly update to this open-source 3D graphics driver stack with significant improvements for OpenGL and Vulkan support and performance.

Given the very strong Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance in the recent low-end/older Linux gaming GPU tests with discrete graphics cards, I was curious to run some benchmarks seeing the current state of Intel's open-source OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance. With the Mesa 18.0 release to be branched soon, it was a good time seeing how the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compare.

Towards the end of December AMD quietly released ROCm 1.7.60 as the newest version of their Radeon Open Compute stack complete with their maturing OpenCL implementation. With the improvements there plus NVIDIA recently introducing their 390 Linux driver series (390.12 Beta currently), I ran some fresh Linux OpenCL GPU compute benchmarks on a variety of AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards for those curious how the current performance stacks up.

Here is a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon Linux graphics card performance as we start 2018. Testing was done using the latest Linux 4.15 Git kernel -- including the KPTI page table isolation support -- as well as using the newest Mesa 17.4-dev driver code for RadeonSI/RADV and on the NVIDIA side is their brand new 390.12 beta driver.

Just hours ago was a new patch series being merged to Mesa Git by RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen to allow for correct DCC usage. I have just finished up my initial benchmarks of those RADV changes and they indeed help the few Radeon GPUs tested.

Back on Christmas Eve I posted our initial AMDVLK Radeon Linux driver benchmarks for this newly open-sourced official Radeon Vulkan driver. Complementing those earlier Vulkan Linux gaming numbers are some more performance metrics for AMDVLK compared to the Mesa-based RADV driver and then the closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver.

One of the common test requests to come in for our end-of-year benchmarking has been a fresh look at the Radeon GPU performance incorporating some both old and new GPUs to see the current state of the open-source driver stack. Tests were done from a Radeon HD 5830 on the Radeon+R600g driver stack to the RX Vega 64 on AMDGPU+RadeonSI, while using the Linux 4.15-rc5 kernel paired with Mesa 17.4-dev.

With AMD's release on Friday of the long-awaited open-source "AMDVLK" Radeon Vulkan driver here are our initial benchmarks of this official Radeon open-source Vulkan driver compared to the unofficial RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver and the similar AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 closed-source Vulkan driver.

Last week I reported on AMD finally preparing their open-source Vulkan driver that many Linux enthusiasts have been looking forward to since the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago. As of this morning, the source-code to this official AMD Vulkan driver is now publicly available. AMD Linux fans and developers can rejoice this weekend building out this "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver and its new Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL).

For GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics processors from AMD, they are supported both by the Radeon DRM driver (the default) as well as the AMDGPU DRM driver (designed for GCN 1.2+ GPUs). As it's been a while since comparing the performance impact of changing the kernel driver for these older GCN graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel with Mesa 17.4-dev using a few GCN 1.0/1.1 cards.

Yesterday I provided some benchmarks showing how the Radeon RX Vega performance has evolved since launch but if looking more broadly at how the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux gaming performance has advanced over the course of 2017, the gains become much more profound. Here are tests of the open-source driver state over 2017 when testing an older Radeon HD 7950 (GCN 1.0) graphics card as well as a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 580 graphics cards.

As part of our end-of-year benchmarking, a Phoronix Premium supporter had brought up the idea of seeing how the Radeon RX Vega Linux driver performance has evolved since launch. Ask and you shall receive: here's some numbers showing the state of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 performance with the open-source RadeonSI+AMDGPU performance as of this week compared to back on launch-day.

Given this week's release of the big AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver update, here are some fresh OpenCL GPU benchmarks comparing the performance of AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards on this newest Linux driver to that of the latest NVIDIA GeForce GPUs on their respective newest driver.

With today's AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver release alongside the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver for Windows users, it's significant in a few ways. First and foremost, AMD has stuck to their word of the past two years and is now able to open-source their official Vulkan Linux driver. When it comes to AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 itself you are now able to mix-and-match driver components to choose what pieces you want of AMD's somewhat complicated driver make-up. Additionally, their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 17.50 have some new feature capabilities. So with that said here's a fresh look at how the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 professional driver performance compares to the latest open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers.

Ahead of the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago, we heard that for AMD's Vulkan Linux driver it was initially going to be closed-source and would then be open-sourced once ready. At the time it sounded like something that would be opened up six months or so, but finally that milestone is being reached! Ahead of Christmas, AMD is publishing the source code to their official Vulkan Linux driver.

There's more Radeon Linux excitement today beyond AMD finally open-sourcing their Vulkan driver. Coming out today is the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 driver that bundles in the open-source RADV and RadeonSI drivers too, in letting you "mix and match" the driver components you want for your system.

For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some fresh benchmarks of the very latest NVIDIA and Radeon Linux graphics drivers.

When carrying out the 11-way Linux distribution boot time tests I also used that as an opportunity for some fresh OpenGL graphics tests with the Intel system on the variety of Linux distributions benchmarked.

With AMDGPU DC having been merged a few days ago for the Linux 4.15 merge window, it's now possible to run the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with display support using the mainline kernel without having to resort to using a patched/third-party kernel build or using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Here are some tests I have carried out with the Radeon RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and other graphics cards from Linux 4.15 Git compared to a few NVIDIA GPUs.

Mesa 17.3 is due out in the days ahead as the Q4'2017 installment of Mesa 3D for delivering the updated open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver stacks for Linux and other platforms. As usual, this quarterly update to Mesa introduces a ton of new features, performance improvements, and other enhancements.

It's been a while since last posting any open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) benchmarks compared to the official NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver simply as there hasn't been too much progress to report on recently. There still isn't re-clocking for Maxwell 2 and Kepler GPUs, dynamic re-clocking remains unimplemented for earlier generations of GPUs, there is not a Nouveau Vulkan driver yet, and they remain tackling OpenGL 4.4~4.5 compliance. But for those wondering how the performance of Nouveau is with re-clocked Kepler / Maxwell 1 graphics cards, here are some fresh benchmarks of the very latest NVIDIA Linux drivers.