Mesa 12.0 To Mesa 18.0 Benchmarks Show The OpenGL/Vulkan Radeon Evolution

Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.

Mesa 12.0 was released back in July of 2016 with OpenGL 4.3 support and Intel's Vulkan driver as the headlining features. Mesa 13.0 meanwhile came in November of 2016 with OpenGL 4.5 and RADV Vulkan. It was at the start of 2017 that Mesa developers changed to their YEAR.QUARTER versioning scheme rather than reserving major version bumps for hitting a new version of the OpenGL specification.

For this benchmarking comparison Mesa 12.0, 13.0, 17.0, and 18.0 Git branches were used meaning 12.0.6, 13.0.6, 17.0.7, and 18.0-rc3. The latest LLVM version supported/compatible by each branch was used for the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end.

From this Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 Intel Core i7 system a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were run using a Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury graphics cards. All benchmarks conducted via the Phoronix Test Suite. The test selection was obviously limited to those Linux games that would still work going back to Mesa 12.0 / OpenGL 4.3, etc.