RadeonSI/Gallium3D Still Appears To Have Greater CPU Overhead Than The NVIDIA Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 22 May 2017 at 08:39 AM EDT. 30 Comments
NVIDIA
In CPU-bound Linux games, the NVIDIA Linux driver still appears to perform better than the newest RadeonSI Gallium3D code.

While Mesa 17.2-dev has the new RadeonSI threaded code, in CPU bound games the NVIDIA Linux driver appears to be more efficient than RadeonSI/Gallium3D. The gap between the RadeonSI and NVIDIA appears to be tighter than the last time we ran some intentional CPU-bound tests, but NVIDIA is still doing better off.
CPU Bound NVIDIA vs. Radeon Linux Testing

Below is a sampling of some results, carried out as some extra data points while preparing for a Radeon RX 560 Linux review later today and a GeForce GT 1030 Linux review later this week.
CPU Bound NVIDIA vs. Radeon Linux Testing

With this open-source Enemy Territory game at 1080p, it's easily CPU bound on modern hardware... The results are basically flatlined on each driver stack, but the NVIDIA driver is delivering 8% or so higher performance than RadeonSI on the assortment of old/new and high/low-end graphics cards. With this test, even the GeForce GTX 750 series is doing better than AMD's Radeon RX 500 series.
CPU Bound NVIDIA vs. Radeon Linux Testing

It's a similar story with Team Fortress 2 at 1080p on the latest Mesa code compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Stay tuned for the Radeon RX 560 Linux review with more interesting GPU-demanding benchmarks in a couple hours.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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