RadeonSI Gallium3D Made Impressive Performance Gains In 2017

Yesterday I provided some benchmarks showing how the Radeon RX Vega performance has evolved since launch but if looking more broadly at how the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux gaming performance has advanced over the course of 2017, the gains become much more profound. Here are tests of the open-source driver state over 2017 when testing an older Radeon HD 7950 (GCN 1.0) graphics card as well as a Radeon R9 Fury and RX 580 graphics cards.

The tests in this article are of these three GCN 1.0 Southern Islands, Polaris, and Fiji GPUs when comparing the driver performance near the start of 2017 to where the driver stacks are now at the end of the year. For representing the start of the year's performance, the driver configuration of Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (same as what's in Ubuntu 17.04) was used for testing with the Linux 4.10 kernel and Mesa 17.0.7 built against LLVM 4.0.0. That doesn't quite represent where the driver state was in January, but quite close and also what many users who use the out-of-the-box distribution drivers will find for performance. So that was used as the starting point in this testing.

From the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation, there was then the upgrade to the Linux 4.15 Git kernel as of yesterday as well as Mesa 17.4-dev built against LLVM 6.0 SVN. Those updated user-space components were from the Padoka PPA while the Linux 4.15 Git kernel from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

The tests in this article are just looking at the RadeonSI OpenGL performance impact while other year-end articles will look at the RADV Vulkan performance maturity and feature progression for 2017. Similar tests on the NVIDIA side are also being carried out at Phoronix. If you enjoy all my daily Linux benchmarks, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Thanks for your support this holiday season.