RADV vs. AMDVLK vs. Radeon Software Vulkan Driver Performance - October 2018 Linux Gaming

RADV was delivering around the same frame-rates as AMDVLK with Talos Principle, but the PRO driver with its proprietary back-end was delivering much greater frame-rates.

When running Thrones of Britannia at 1440p with medium quality settings, the performance was similar across the three tested driver stacks.

But when cranking this Total War game up to extreme settings, the AMDVLK-based drivers were slightly ahead of RADV.

Lastly in the open-source synthetic VKMark Vulkan benchmark, AMDVLK/PRO had some leads over RADV on the RX 580 Polaris while for the Vega GPU there was a much more substantial performance difference.

For the most part the RADV driver stack is close to -- or at par -- for performing with the official AMDVLK Vulkan driver while being part of Mesa and is what most Linux gamers prefer or find themselves using out-of-the-box. With the PRO Vulkan driver in several cases its proprietary back-end was delivering some performance advantages, but it also ran into compatibility issues running a few of the Linux games tested.