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

F1 2020 was tested as it has run well with Steam Play for some time and can work with the Mesa drivers from a year ago, unlike F1 2021 that is still getting its kinks worked out with Mesa and Proton.

With F1 2020 there were some nice performance gains to spot for 2021 especially with the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card enjoying some very nice improvements when going to Ubuntu 21.10 and even more so with Linux 5.16 + Mesa 22.0.

HITMAN 2, as the latest in the franchise currently on Steam and running with Steam Play, also enjoyed some nice performance gains over the course of 2021 with the AMD open-source graphics driver stack for Linux.

Meanwhile Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 game enjoyed RadeonSI optimizations made in 2021. For the Radeon RX 6800 XT there was significant uplift for the driver stack found in Ubuntu 21.10 but did regression with the newer driver code, but at least still ahead of the EO 2020 state.