Radeon Software 18.20 vs. Mesa 18.2 RadeonSI/RADV Linux Driver Performance

Last week AMD released the Radeon Software 18.20 driver "AMDGPU-PRO" with support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If you are curious how their closed-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver performance is comparing to the latest Mesa-based open-source driver, here are performance metrics using the latest drivers.

On an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 system, the new Radeon Software 18.20 driver was tested with its "PRO" components providing the closed-source OpenGL 4.6 driver as well as their closed-source Vulkan driver (what is the AMDVLK open-source driver albeit built against their proprietary shader compiler rather than the current open-source AMDGPU LLVM code path).

On the pure open-source driver side were tests on the Ubuntu 18.04 system but upgrading to the stable Linux 4.17.2 kernel and Mesa 18.2-devel built against LLVM 6.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA.

On these two open-source Radeon Linux driver stacks, the Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards were used for benchmarking. The Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.