RADV Vulkan Driver Ends The Year On A High Note With A Performance Boost

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 29 December 2017 at 06:32 PM EST. Page 1 of 3. 14 Comments.

Just hours ago was a new patch series being merged to Mesa Git by RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen to allow for correct DCC usage. I have just finished up my initial benchmarks of those RADV changes and they indeed help the few Radeon GPUs tested.

The patches merged to Mesa earlier today are about Delta Color Compression (DCC) as lossless color compression for GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer. DCC allows for significant bandwidth savings and previously wasn't being optimally supported by RADV, but that's changed now thanks to the work done by Nieuwenhuizen.

In the commit message Bas mentioned "5~10%" performance improvements when using a RX Vega at 4K. I've carried out some initial tests on a Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 64 and have found the performance benefits to be very significant. Here are those initial numbers on the three graphics cards before/after these changes.

Vulkan RADV DCC

What a great way to end 2017 and I'll be running some fresh AMDVLK comparison as well as versus NVIDIA. If you enjoy all of our daily benchmarking, show your support with our end-of-year offering.


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