AMD Radeon Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Performance: 2020 vs. 2021

First up was Batman: Arkham Knight as one of the titles that runs well through Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Batman: Arkham Knight has run well on Steam Play for more than a year and thus a good choice for this end-of-year driver comparison. Even going back to Vega there were some small performance gains made this year while more pronounced for the RDNA2 hardware. It does look though like the bleeding-edge AMD driver code does regress things slightly for this game compared to the Ubuntu 21.10 state. At least even in the slightly slower state of Linux 5.16 + Mesa Git, it's still ahead of where it was one year ago.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was tested as one of the most demanding Linux-native OpenGL games that was ported by Feral Interactive prior to the company beginning to focus on Vulkan-powered ports. The Radeon VII performance in this OpenGL game regressed this year as did the RX 6800 XT performance going from Ubuntu 20.10 to 21.10 but at least there the Mesa Git performance puts it slightly ahead of where the performance was from one year ago.

DiRT Rally 2.0 runs on Linux via Steam Play and has been working well for some time there. At least with this game going through the RADV Vulkan driver thanks to DXVK, there were some nice performance gains to see in 2021 across all tested graphics cards.

Running DiRT Rally 2.0 with ultra quality settings was showing nice gains for 2021 especially with the latest-generation RDNA2 graphics card.