Mesa 13.0 vs. 17.0 Performance For RADV/RadeonSI: Big Gains For Vulkan, OpenGL Boosts

With Mesa 17.0 due to be released in the days ahead, I've been running fresh benchmarks of this latest user-space 3D driver stack on Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau. For your viewing pleasure this Thursday are the RadeonSI benchmarks comparing the Mesa 17.0 Git code to that of the latest Mesa 13.0 branch with a few different AMD graphics cards. There are also some tests of the RADV Vulkan driver.

For this RadeonSI/RADV comparison is testing the latest Mesa 13.0 and 17.0 Git branches as of Wednesday, 8 February. This means Mesa 13.0.4 in effect and 17.0.0-rc3. The tests were done in conjunction with the Linux 4.10 Git kernel as well. I didn't go back further than Mesa 13.0 since that is when RADV landed, etc. For those curious how Mesa 17.1-devel meanwhile compares with the Git master code, in a follow-up article I'll include some Git results for RadeonSI/NVC0/i965. LLVM 3.9 was used on Mesa 13.0 while LLVM 4.0 was used on Mesa 17.0; Mesa 13.0.4 wasn't building correctly with LLVM 4.0.

The graphics cards for this Mesa 13 vs. 17 comparison were the Radeon RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. I was going to go back a bit further but was running into an HDMI regression, at least with this particular monitor being used.

Aside from the performance, when going from Mesa 13.0 to 17.0 for RadeonSI it also means going from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.5. OpenGL 4.5 still isn't officially passing the Khronos CTS, but all the necessary extensions are in place. For more details on the feature changes for Mesa 17.0, read our The Big Changes, Improvements Of Mesa 17.0. Mesa 17.0 will be released potentially as soon as Friday.