Early Radeon DRM-Next Tests Ahead Of Linux 4.7, Mesa 11.3: Many Improvements, One Card Falls

With the AMDGPU and Radeon changes all settled down for what's proposed for Linux 4.7, this weekend I'm benchmarking both of these open-source AMD Linux Direct Rendering Manager drivers. First up is the Radeon DRM driver with various OpenGL benchmarks in conjunction with Mesa 11.3-devel.

While the AMDGPU DRM driver is where AMD developers are spending a bulk of their time these days, the DRM-Next code still has a number of improvements to the Radeon DRM driver for pre-GCN1.2 GPUs. See The AMDGPU Additions For Linux 4.7 Are Enormous for more details on what's happening in the red space for the upcoming Linux 4.7 merge window.

For today's Radeon tests (AMDGPU will be on Sunday), I was testing a Radeon HD 6950, HD 7950, R9 290, and R7 370 as some of my available hardware supported by this driver. All tests were done on the same system and with an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 base while using Mesa 11.3-devel from the Padoka PPA. With each graphics card I tested a mainline 4.6-rc7 kernel and compared its performance to Alex Deucher's drm-next-4.7 branch of the new AMD code. If you want to use the same drm-next-4.7 kernel I used, you can download my test kernel.

All of the OpenGL tests for this Radeon DRM comparison were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.