The Very Latest RadeonSI Git Code Provides Minor Benefits For Total War: WARHAMMER

Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER for Linux this week. On launch-day we provided NVIDIA Linux benchmarks as well as RadeonSI GPU benchmarks for this game over many different GPUs. Also landing on launch-day in Mesa Git were support for compiling optimized shader variants asynchronously in RadeonSI. So here are some benchmarks with the very newest Git to show the performance difference, which some have claimed is up to 25% faster. [This article was previously only available to Phoronix Premium members while is now available to everyone.]

Building off the Total War: WARHAMMER results from earlier this week, here are some fresh AMD GPU results when using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver from Git on 23 November, thereby including the just-landed improvements to RadeonSI. The kernel was with Linux 4.9 Git and other system settings/configuration remained the same.

There were claims by some that these newest patches boosted the game performance up to 25% better, but from my tests, that isn't the case. But there are some minor improvements to see in some areas.

Testing with the RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury, the performance with the day-newer Mesa code did provide some performance gains, but nowhere close to 25%. The R9 Fury and RX 480 performance were each up by about 7%.

At 1080p with low image quality settings, the R9 Fury performance went from 112 to 122 FPS while the RX 480 went from 100 to 105 FPS.

Some more minor yet still significant -- as every improvement counts for the open-source drivers especially -- gains for RadeonSI with the Git code from yesterday.


As the intensity increased, the performance improvements decreased. At 4K the performance was now basically unchanged with the newer Mesa.

Well, that answers things for those who were curious about the Total War: WARHAMMER with the latest patches by Marek. I wasn't able to get anywhere close to 25% better performance, but at least there are indeed some improvements for RadeonSI Linux gamers with this brand new Linux game.