13-Way Radeon AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 vs. NVIDIA Linux OpenCL Compute Comparison

For the performance-per-dollar results, the pricing from NewEgg.com were used where able to obtain the cards new and in stock.

To not a lot of surprise, the GeForce GTX 1050 and RX 560 tend to lead in value.

The GeForce GTX 1050 was delivering the best performance-per-dollar for Ethereum mining.

While the Radeon RX 560 delivered the best value in Darktable.

The RX 560 also had the best value with the Blender 3D modeling performance on OpenCL.

Overall, the OpenCL stack in AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 is in fairly good shape. The Radeon RX Vega OpenCL performance on Linux has certainly improved compared to where it was first at when the Vega GPUs first launched. However, in a few of the OpenCL tests still showed Radeon GPU OpenCL performance issues across all of the tested GPUs.

Looking forward to 2018, OpenCL on Radeon GPUs should be even more exciting once the necessary AMDKFD kernel driver changes are upstreamed, any LLVM changes also upstreamed, etc, so that the ROCm OpenCL compute stack can begin to run on a fully open-source and upstream environment.