RADV/RadeonSI Benchmarks On Mesa 18.0

With Mesa 18.0 now well into its feature freeze and this quarterly update to Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers bringing many new features and improvements as covered in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview here are some benchmarks comparing the Mesa 18.0 RadeonSI/RADV driver performance to the current 17.3 stable series and the older 17.2 series as well.

For those wondering how Mesa 18.0 is shaping up for its release in a few weeks, I started this week off by running some fresh Mesa benchmarks with a Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 56 graphics cards. Tests were done on the Core i7 8700K Coffee Lake test box running Ubuntu 17.10. Linux 4.15.0 was running on this system for the latest stable DRM code.

The Mesa releases compared were Mesa 17.2.4 as found out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 17.10 for reference. There was also Mesa 17.3.2 stable obtained from the Padoka Stable PPA. Lastly was the state as of Mesa 18.0.0-rc3 built against LLVM 7.0 SVN.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of Radeon OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were carried out for seeing how Mesa 18.0 performance compares to 17.3 and 17.2 stable.