AMDVLK Still Has Some Performance Advantages Over Mesa's Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver, But It's A Good Fight

With Total War: Thrones of Britannia, the RADV vs. AMDVLK performance was close on the two Vega graphics cards benchmarked.

With our Warhammer 2 benchmarking, the RADV driver was noticeably faster over AMDVLK.

It still depends upon the game whether AMDVLK or RADV is the fastest AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver, but the results generally are quite close. If looking at the harmonic mean for all the FPS data captured, the RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII roughly equate to about the same level of performance with just a frame advantage to AMD's official AMDVLK driver. The benefit, of course, with RADV is that it's part of Mesa and thus distributed as part of most Linux distributions and a more diverse range of contributors while AMDVLK is what AMD is officially supporting and built off the same sources as their Windows Vulkan driver. Moving forward with the Radeon RX 5700 (Navi) graphics hardware, AMDVLK will likely see an initial advantage there until the RADV developers have had time to work out their next-gen GPU support. At least though there is shared code in the form of the AMDGPU LLVM back-end.