AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1 RADV/RadeonSI Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1 RADV/RadeonSI Performance

Released at the end of last week was a long-awaited update to the Radeon hybrid Linux driver, AMDGPU-PRO. The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 update brings support for newer kernel releases so this driver finally deploys nicely on Ubuntu 16.04.2 / 16.10 and also has a number of fixes. Here are some benchmark results of this latest AMDGPU-PRO release compared to the latest open-source Radeon Linux driver stack in the form of the Linux 4.11 kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=24496

[andrei_me]

So use AMDGPU-PRO only if OpenGL's perf is not the reason?

[duby229]

So use AMDGPU-PRO only if OpenGL's perf is not the reason?

Only if you use an app that requires compatibility profiles. But really in that case you should actually boycot that app. And contact the app developers/company and explain to them specifically why you are boycotting it.

[humbug]

Basically the open driver dominates in openGL.

The proprietary driver dominates in Vulkan.

[duby229]

Basically the open driver dominates in openGL.

The proprietary driver dominates in Vulkan.

AMD spent years claiming that the OpenGL performance would only be capable of achieving roughly 70% the proprietary drivers performance. If the history of the OpenGL driver is any indication, the Vulkan performance will catch up sooner or later. And if radv itself is any indication, it won't be too much longer.

[oooverclocker]

The RADV performance isn't even as bad as expected. It looks like it's evolving well. That's really amazing.

[muncrief]

Unfortunately the last AMDGPU-PRO version that at least partially worked with Wine games was 16.50. This is unfortunate because some pretty awesome games, like No Man's Sky, require OpenGL 4.5 to run. And while Mesa constantly claims to support OpenGL 4.5, the fact is that it really doesn't. It has what's called a "core" 4.5 profile, but most games look for the compatibility profile, which has forever been stuck on OpenGL 3.0.

And I say it works "partially" because while you can install 16.50 and play No Man's Sky, most other games don't work. So the choice is to install Mesa to play DirectX games or OpenGL games that don't require anything over 3.0, or install AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 to play OpenGL 4.5 games. And as any experienced Linux user knows, changing video drivers is difficult and fraught with possible errors. In fact I often have to restore a system backup after changing drivers.

And by the way, I've experimented with stock distribution versions of wine, wine development and wine staging, as well as actually compiling wine myself a few times. But sadly nothing can be done. The truth is that after all this time the state of AMD drivers on Linux is still abysmal. In fact other than experimentation I've pretty much given up on gaming. Yes, I could boot into my dual Windows 10 installation for games, but I've always found logging into Windows 10 similar to being punched in the face.

[puleglot]

Something wrong with Tomb Raider test - same FPS at different resolutions.

[humbug]

Something wrong with Tomb Raider test - same FPS at different resolutions.

Looks like a CPU limit. Very high fps and little to seperate the rx 480 and the fury.
This was at normal graphics preset, things would probably be different at higher graphics settings.

[darkbasic]

This is unfortunate because some pretty awesome games, like No Man's Sky, require OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile to run

I never ever encountered such games... Most of the times they pretend to use compatibility profile, but usually they don't use anything besides the core profile and you can easily circumvent the warning.