Another Look At The Maturing AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series Linux Performance

SuperTuxKart is another OpenGL Linux game (and open-source) where the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is quite competitive with NVIDIA's offerings and well regarded Linux driver stack.

Tesseract was another OpenGL game showing the stellar AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D performance for Navi and Vega against NVIDIA Turing parts.

If taking the geometric mean of these latest Linux driver benchmark results for both OpenGL and Vulkan, that's the current shakedown. The Radeon RX 5700 Linux performance was just shy of the Radeon RX Vega 64 which in turn is just below the GeForce RTX 2070. For The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, the performance came in mid-way between the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080.

We're now nearly one month in since the Radeon RX 5700 series launch and the Linux driver support is becoming quite good though there still are some cases with select games where the performance is coming in short, as shown in this article. On the open-source AMDVLK driver side, the experience there with that Vulkan driver option has remained quite buggy and thus haven't been able to get any tests completed there yet for Navi. But assuming you are comfortable using a bleeding-edge Linux kernel and Mesa 19.2 Git either by building it yourself or using third-party packages, the experience for the Radeon RX 5700 series is easily quite usable at this stage. During this round of testing no Navi hangs or other issues were encountered.