AMD Radeon VII Linux Benchmarks - Powerful Open-Source Graphics For Compute & Gaming

Up next is looking at the OpenCL compute performance on this same system and the Radeon cards running off ROCm 2.0 while the NVIDIA cards have their OpenCL driver in the 415.27 driver release.

First up was the Lczero chess benchmark using OpenCL where the Radeon VII comes in with a 62% improvement over the RX Vega 64! But this particular program is one that performs very poorly with Radeon/ROCm... Where the Radeon VII performance puts it just in line with the GTX 1070, but this case isn't anything specific to Vega 20.

Once hitting PlaidML for various machine learning benchmarks with OpenCL, our concerns were certainly relieved... Assuming no poor application issues with ROCm, the OpenCL performance can be great. The Radeon RX Vega 64 with this inference benchmark only performed in line with the GTX 1070 Ti but now with the Radeon VII the performance is competing with the RTX 2080. In this benchmark it's a 38% improvement from the RX Vega 64 to Radeon VII.

The strong Radeon VII performance in PlaidML also led to very competitive performance-per-Watt with the NVIDIA hardware.