Radeon Vulkan Driver Benchmarks: AMDVLK 2018.4.2 vs. AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 vs. Mesa 18.2/19.0

With Total War: WARHAMMER II it was just released for Linux this past week. While both AMD and the Mesa developers generally have early access to new Feral game ports, we haven't seen any AMDGPU-PRO/AMDVLK updates mention any changes specific to this game. For this at-launch support, the Mesa performance was in the slight lead.

At ultra quality settings, Mesa RADV was still leading over AMDVLK/AMDGPU-PRO.

For pre-Vega Radeon hardware, the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver performance remains mostly on-par with the AMDVLK Vulkan driver performance but for some games AMDGPU-PRO is still the fastest option with its proprietary shader compiler. AMD developers have said they plan to switch over to using the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for all their drivers in the future, but at this point it's still not as mature as their closed-source code. Particularly for the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, there still appears to be quite a bit of room to optimize the RADV/LLVM performance.