A Preliminary Look At Radeon RX 6800 XT Windows Performance vs. Open-Source Linux Drivers

The LuxCore OpenGL renderer results were a mess. With the Radeon RX 6800 XT there was abnormally high variation between runs but ultimately the performance was close between the Windows and ROCm Linux OpenCL drivers. But for two of the scenes, the LuxCore renderer process would hang with the ROCm OpenCL driver.

For the IndigoBench renderer with OpenCL, the Windows vs. Linux compute performance was very similar with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

Geekbench 5's rating of OpenCL and Vulkan on the Radeon RX 6800 XT favored Windows but not by too wide of margins. As RADV+ACO is better tuned for RDNA2, I suspect the Vulkan performance should be able to tie or even outperform as we have seen with older hardware generations.

Ultimately though when looking at all of the test results carried out on both operating systems, the current state of the open-source Radeon Linux driver support for the Radeon RX 6800 XT is largely at parity to Windows and their current Radeon Software driver. More gaming tests and the Zen 3 Windows vs. Linux tests for dozens of CPU benchmarks is being wrapped up still at Phoronix.