AMDGPU-PRO vs. Linux 4.7 + Mesa 12.1-dev OpenGL Benchmarks

A few days back I posted a fresh comparison of AMDGPU-PRO against NVIDIA's binary driver on various GPUs. Those numbers didn't include any direct AMDGPU-PRO vs. open-source Radeon/AMDGPU + RadeonSI numbers, but here they are on a couple GPUs if you are curious about the state of Linux 4.7 Git and Mesa 12.1-dev.

This weekend I compared the results of the AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 hybrid driver to what's offered right now via Linux 4.7 Git and Mesa 12.1-dev (from the Padoka PPA, built against LLVM 3.9 SVN). The cards tested under each driver stack were the R9 285 Tonga, R9 290 Hawaii, and R9 Fury Fiji.

All the benchmarks, of course, were run via the Phoronix Test Suite.

The R9 290 on the Radeon DRM driver was still running into an issue with slow BioShock Infinite performance. The open-source driver stack has a ways to go for running this game on the very highest settings.

Interestingly for the Source Engine powered Insurgency game, the open-source driver stack was significantly faster than AMDGPU-PRO... Perhaps due to Insurgency not being covered by any application profiles, similar to what we saw when tweaking CS:GO long ago on the AMD binary blob.


The R9 290 ended up being much slower than the R9 285 and R9 Fury in this round of testing for running the demanding Unigine tests.

The R9 290 looks like it may have hit some regression recently...

You can dig through all of this weekend benchmarking test data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.