The Polaris/Vega Performance At The End Of Mesa 18.3 Feature Development

With Mesa 18.3 feature development having wrapped up at the end of October, here are some benchmarks showing how the updated RadeonSI and RADV drivers are performing for this code that is now under a feature freeze before its official release around the end of November. AMD Radeon Vega and Polaris graphics cards were tested with a slew of NVIDIA graphics cards also tested on their respective driver to show where the Linux gaming GPU performance is at as we head into the 2018 holiday shopping season.

These tests were done on Ubuntu 18.10 but with switching to Linux 4.19 stable and Mesa 18.3-devel built against LLVM 8.0 SVN for showing the current open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan performance potential for Polaris/Vega GPUs. The Radeon cards tested were the RX 560, RX 580, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

For putting the current Radeon Mesa performance into perspective, the NVIDIA 410.73 driver was benchmarked with the GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080 Ti based on the newer graphics cards I had available for benchmarking.

Tests were done form the Intel Core i9 9900K box with Ubuntu 18.10 while running a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan gaming benchmarks, including the few Steam Play capable game benchmarks so far. All of these benchmarks were handled by our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.