Quake II RTX Performance For AMD Radeon 6000 Series vs. NVIDIA On Linux

Last month with the Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 driver there was finally Vulkan ray-tracing support added to that proprietary Vulkan driver component, the first time that Vulkan ray-tracing has been available on Linux for any AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics card across the multiple driver options. Last month I posted some initial Vulkan ray-tracing AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while questions were raised how well the driver performs with NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port. Here are some initial benchmarks for those wondering.

To complement the data points from last month, here is a quick look at the Quake II RTX performance on Linux across various NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards plus the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards I have available.

The latest AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers were used in each case running on the same AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system. In the AMD case, selectively installing the "PRO" Vulkan driver components atop the Ubuntu 21.04 base while using the latest upstream kernel.




At least with the current Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 packaged Vulkan driver, the Vulkan ray-tracing performance is painfully low for NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port on Linux. In the other RT tests the performance was at least more comparable, but we'll see how the next packaged AMD Linux driver looks as well as once RADV has working ray-tracing support. The VKD3D-Proton developers also found the Radeon Software driver not working well so hopefully the next driver release will be in better shape.