Ahead Of Radeon RX Vega, AMDGPU+RadeonSI Is Offering The Most Competitive Performance Yet Against NVIDIA On Linux

This is where it will be interesting to see where the performance-per-Watt of Radeon RX Vega does... The reported TDP numbers for the Vega cards are rather high, but we'll see how it looks in the real-world with Linux gaming and how well tuned the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver is for Vega power management.

Here's a look at the recorded AC system power consumption numbers over the duration of all the benchmarks executed for this article:

Lastly, here's the overall GPU temperatures of the cards tested over the span of all the Linux gaming tests carried outL

Keep in mind the GPU temperatures can vary a lot depending upon the particular vendor's cooler and other factors.

When it comes to the raw OpenGL performance of the tested R9 290 / RX 480 / RX 580 / R9 Fury graphics cards using Mesa 17.3-devel paired with Linux 4.13, this is easily the most competitive I have ever seen any AMD Linux driver perform (open or closed-source) compared to NVIDIA's Linux driver in my benchmarking over the past 13+ years. In a few of the Linux games the OpenGL numbers were almost jaw-dropping and goes to show the remarkable progress made by AMD, Valve, and others in the open-source community particularly over the past year.

While the raw OpenGL numbers are great, keep in mind the open-source "RADV" Vulkan driver still has a lot of performance optimizations needed and more than a year after Vulkan's release we still have not seen them open-source their long-promised official Vulkan driver. Then in regards to the Radeon RX Vega hardware, keep in mind the particular Linux Vega driver requirements with sadly the mainline Linux kernel not being able to drive monitors connected to Vega cards until at an unknown kernel release in the future and the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver (which does have DC display capabilities) not being widely supported outside of enterprise Linux distributions. It will also be a while before the ROCm OpenCL stack for open-source AMD compute is supported by all mainline components to easily deploy on any modern Linux distribution. The RX Vega performance-per-Watt will also be interesting along with the OpenCL benchmarks and other tests to come in August.

Anyhow, as soon as I am able to get my hands on a Radeon RX Vega card or purchase it due to AMD's currently marketing team apparently not seeing much value in Linux, there will be benchmarks on Phoronix. If you enjoy all these Linux hardware benchmarks, consider going premium.