Windows 10 Radeon Software vs. AMDGPU On Ubuntu Linux

Last week I posted results of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 when looking at NVIDIA's OpenGL performance. As those results were quite interesting, the next installment of our Windows vs. Linux benchmarking are some numbers for AMD Radeon graphics. Tested here were Radeon Software Crimson Edition on Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with AMDGPU vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with the new AMDGPU PRO driver stack.

I used two of the most interesting Radeon cards I had available for testing: the Radeon R9 285 (Tonga) and Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji). The system used for all of this testing was built with an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5, MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, 16GB of DDR4-2133MHz EUDIMM memory, and the mentioned two AMD graphics cards.

On the Windows side was Windows 10 Pro x64 with the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.4.1 driver.

The "Ubuntu 16.04 Stock" results were on Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 with the Linux 4.4 kernel (but Canonical back-ported all of the AMDGPU changes from Linux 4.5 back to their 4.4 kernel, including the re-clocking support) and Mesa 11.2.0. The AMDGPU-PRO stack was AMD's inaugural release of their new PRO Linux driver stack that leverages the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver while being a binary-only user-space providing OpenGL 4.5 support.

All of the Windows and Linux OpenGL benchmarking for this article was driven in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software using OpenGL games/benchmarks known to be of similar quality on Windows and Linux and meet our strict test requirements. If anyone wants to contribute any other test profiles for Windows vs. Linux benchmarking with their favorite games, patches welcome.

For those interested in Windows vs. Linux with Vulkan benchmarks rather than OpenGL, see our comparison last week of Radeon's Vulkan driver on the competing platforms.