Radeon RADV vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Performance For F1 2017 On Linux

For those anxious to see how Radeon graphics cards are performing with Feral's latest Linux game port, F1 2017, here are some preliminary benchmarks of Radeon GPUs with the AMDGPU+RADV driver compared to various NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

Since yesterday's release of F1 2017 on Linux, it's been a very busy benchmarking session and these are just the first of the Radeon Vulkan tests to come of F1 2017. More will be coming over the weekend, including a larger GPU comparison. These are simply the latest results as of Friday afternoon; testing was also compounded by re-testing the NVIDIA GPUs too after Feral discovered a settings issue in their test script. For this article the selection of graphics cards tested were:

- GeForce GTX 1060
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Radeon R9 285
- Radeon RX 550
- Radeon RX 560
- Radeon RX 580
- Radeon R9 Fury
- Radeon RX Vega 56
- Radeon RX Vega 64

As a reminder, the GeForce GTX 680 Kepler is listed as the officially supported minimum for this racing game that's the first Vulkan-exclusive title on Linux. But the GeForce GTX 1070 is their recommended GPU for enjoying the most out of this game. On the AMD side they are simply recommending the AMD Volcanic Islands (GCN 1.2) graphics cards and newer due to needing the RADV Vulkan driver. With AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs currently defaulting to the Radeon DRM driver, there isn't Vulkan support available unless switching the used kernel driver to AMDGPU. A Feral engineer had commented that using the older GCN GPUs when enabling AMDGPU should work, but at least with today's Linux 4.14 + Mesa 17.4 testing stack, with the GCN 1.0 hardware I tested was always a hang immediately when loading the game:

Aside from that GCN 1.0 support not panning out at the moment, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver experience on F1 2017 overall was very good with regards to no stability issues or artifacts. The lone exception was with RADV and Vega. When firing up any RX Vega card with F1 2017, there is the "unsupported GPU" warning message box.

When passing this unsupported warning that isn't shown for other Radeon GPUs with RADV, there were indeed some corruption issues:

These corruption issues happened with both the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. This is not entirely surprising considering the RX Vega support in the RADV Vulkan driver is still maturing. There were no other RADV issues encountered in our initial testing over the past day.

All the Radeon tests were done with AMDGPU+RADV on Linux 4.14 + Mesa 17.4 Git via the Padoka PPA. The NVIDIA tests done with the 384.90 driver. More Radeon and NVIDIA tests forthcoming as well as trying out AMDGPU-PRO, seeing if Intel ANV can handle this game at all, and some other related Vulkan Linux gaming tests in the days ahead.