A Look At The RadeonSI/RADV Performance From Mesa 17.2 To Mesa 18.2

As part of the Phoronix 14th birthday benchmarking this week, I have carried out a fresh comparison to see how the RadeonSI and RADV open-source AMD Linux graphics driver performance has evolved over the past year in Mesa. Tests were done using a Radeon RX 580 and testing every release branch from Mesa 17.2 to the current 18.2-devel.

Testing was done from the past year as going back to Mesa 17.1 and prior would yield a corrupted desktop on those older releases. With Mesa 17.2 and newer, everything was working fine on both the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers in the games tested. For the older Mesa releases, older versions of LLVM had to be paired with it for API compatibility. The combinations of Mesa tested included Mesa 17.2.8 with LLVM 5.0.1, Mesa 17.3.9 with LLVM 6.0.0, Mesa 18.0.5 with LLVM 6.0.0, Mesa 18.1.1 with LLVM 7.0.0, and Mesa 18.2-devel Git as of this week with LLVM 7.0.0 SVN.

The MSI Radeon RX 580 graphics card was used throughout testing given its mature Linux support for the past year. The system table notes the other system details with this benchmarking being driven by the automated Phoronix Test Suite. Now let's see how the Mesa performance looks over the past year.