AMDGPU-PRO vs. Open-Source Gallium3D OpenGL Performance On Polaris Is A Very Tight Race

The tessellation-heavy Unigine Heaven saw around the same performance on the four Polaris and Fiji graphics cards.

With the slightly newer Unigine Valley tech demo, the AMDGPU-PRO driver had a slight performance advantage over the current open-source driver stack.

Lastly, with the Tesseract open-source game the race was close but AMDGPU-PRO was delivering a few more frames per second over the current Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12.1-dev driver code.

With the exceptions of BioShock Infinite and Xonotic, the current open-source Radeon driver (Linux 4.8 + Mesa 12.1-dev) was delivering very competitive performance to the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver. In most tests the performance was close to the same but in some cases like Metro Last Light Redux and Dota 2 the open-source driver was able to begin pulling ahead. Quite amazing overall as just a few years ago it was hard to vision the open-source AMD driver ever outperforming the proprietary driver (at the time, Catalyst)! It will be exciting to see how much further ahead the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver can get in the months ahead now that they're nearly caught up with OpenGL 4.4~4.5 compliance. Hopefully there will also be more open-source OpenCL and Vulkan happenings to report on in the months ahead.

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