Radeon RX 550 Linux Benchmarks: $89 Polaris GPU On Open-Source

As reported yesterday, the Radeon RX 550 wasn't working out-of-the-box with RadeonSI Gallium3D even though the RX 580 worked out fine last month on Linux and the RX 550 is just another Polaris part. The Polaris 12 support within the AMDGPU winsys code within Mesa had a faulty case statement, which ended up borking the RX 550 / Polaris 12 support. After yesterday's article, Marek quickly pushed the fix into Mesa Git and it's currently pending for Mesa 17.1 back-porting. So if you want to use a Radeon RX 550 with the open-source driver, you need to be using Mesa Git within the past day.

The RADV Vulkan driver didn't add Polaris 12 support until merely hours ago after Marek posted the Polaris 12 winsys fix. In this article are just OpenGL tests as a result of the patch not being out there when starting this testing.

The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver does work fine with the Radeon RX 550. I'll have RX 550 tests of the hybrid driver stack in a separate, upcoming article.

For this article are benchmarks of various Radeon GPUs tested using DRM-Next for Linux 4.12 paired with Mesa 17.2-devel Git. The tested Radeon hardware included the R7 260X, R9 285, R7 370, RX 460, RX 480, RX 550, and RX 580.

On the NVIDIA side was the 378.13 driver release. The tested NVIDIA GPUs were the GeForce GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1060.

Given the nature of this low-end card, I also ran an HD Graphics 630 Kabylake run with the Core i7 7700K that was used throughout the testing process. The Intel graphics were on Mesa 17.2-dev + DRM-Next 4.12 too.

Following the OpenGL performance results are also some performance-per-Watt (system power consumption measured via a WattsUp power meter) as well as GPU core temperatures.