Trying amd-staging-drm-next With The Radeon RX Vega

With my Radeon RX Vega benchmarks so far this week I have been using the amd-staging-4.12 tree that contains the DC display code and Vega support. Though even with fresher code is amd-staging-drm-next, so here are some benchmarks.

The amd-staging-drm-next is tracking the AMDGPU DRM changes queued for Linux 4.14 but also has the DC display code tacked into place even though that won't be ready for Linux 4.14 mainline. Some Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing OpenGL Vega benchmarks here so I ran some compared to the amd-staging-4.12 kernel.

No RADV Vulkan benchmarks on this kernel yet as waiting for the Vulkan GFX9/Vega changes to settle down first in Mesa. The other interesting thing will be OpenCL benchmarks off the 4.14-based kernel given the 2MB page support, but there aren't yet updated ROCm builds for this new kernel base.




Anyhow, between amd-staging-4.12 and amd-staging-drm-next I didn't see any significant changes in OpenGL performance for the RX Vega 56 or RX Vega 64 when using RadeonSI Mesa 17.3-dev. More results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for those interested. One regression I did notice when using this -next code was the display/colors appeared darker / washed out during testing compared to amd-staging-4.12, so any new Vega owners will probably want to be using that kernel for the time being.