Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Radeon Gaming Performance With Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.2

First up was Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which premiered last November for Linux and was ported by Feral Interactive. With Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Linux there is the default D3D11 renderer and then a beta D3D12 renderer, both of which were tested. Under Linux is just OpenGL.

This first test is rather CPU limited but was curious about the cross-OS performance. Similar to our last Windows Deus Ex testing, the D3D12 renderer remains slower on Radeon than the default and fully-vetted renderer. What's exciting though is the performance of the Radeon R9 Fury now under Linux when running this game at 1080p with low quality settings... Initially the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance with RadeonSI Gallium3D was very slow, but it's gotten much better. In this comparison, it's gotten 50% faster with Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.3-dev compared to Linux 4.10 + Mesa 17.0. The R9 Fury is also now faster than the D3D12 renderer but still slower than the out-of-the-box configuration on Windows. The RX 580's performance seemed to benefit less under Linux with the recent Mesa changes.

When moving to ultra quality settings for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the Linux performance shows strong strides for both the RX 580 and R9 Fury. With every step of the way the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI performance has improved and much better off than where it was months ago.

GRID Autosport has also showed significant gains with every Mesa/kernel upgrade tested. From Linux 4.10 + Mesa 17.0 to Linux 4.13 + Mesa Git is a 52% gain on the RX 580 and 45% on the R9 Fury. Incredible gains considering it's less than one year of progress on the open-source Radeon driver.