AMDGPU-PRO vs. RadeonSI/RADV & NVIDIA's Linux Drivers To End 2016

First up are the Vulkan results with the compatible NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards under Linux.

With Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9 as of last week compared to AMDGPU-PRO 16.50, at least with Dota 2 when starting with this CPU-limited 800x600 resolution, the two AMD drivers performed nearly the same. In fact, the Polaris and Fiji cards had a very slight performance advantage over this AMD hybrid driver, but the NVIDIA results remained faster in this scenario.

For OpenGL at 800 x 600 in Dota 2, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is much faster than AMDGPU-PRO. From comparing the two graphs above, the Vulkan AMDGPU-PRO driver remains much more competitive than its OpenGL driver, as expected given the troubled history of their GL driver stack.

With Dota 2's OpenGL renderer at 1920 x 1080, AMDGPU-PRO was still noticeably slower than the current RadeonSI driver, but in turn the RadeonSI driver still wasn't as competitive with the NVIDIA Linux driver. Under Vulkan, the AMDGPU-PRO and RADV drivers were effectively the same but still need to squeeze a few more frames to be competitive with the NVIDIA Linux driver.