BioShock Infinite Runs Much Faster For RadeonSI On Mesa Git: ~40%

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 13 August 2016 at 10:40 AM EDT. 63 Comments
MESA
Earlier this week the deferred flushes change landed in Radeon Gallium3D code for reportedly offering 23%+ performance improvements in BioShock Infinite as one example. I've tested out BioShock Infinite and other changes to confirm the performance differences.

I compared the Mesa numbers from last weekend on various AMD GPUs to that of the very latest Mesa Git code as offered by the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu Linux. The same Linux kernel and other components were maintained with the only difference being the Mesa Git code from the start of the week to the end of the week.

The R9 285, R7 370, R9 Fury, RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480 were tested with the new and old Mesa from the past week.

BioShock Infinite is indeed much faster on all of these tested AMD GCN GPUs. The biggest performance improvement I found in the BioShock Infinite benchmark via the Phoronix Test Suite was 40% faster! It's great to see these boosts, but as you can tell from the results, there still is more work to be done: all of these results were basically flat-lined between the various GPUs.

And compare those numbers to the recent NVIDIA results in the 18-way Linux GPU comparison I published a few days ago... Those numbers for NVIDIA show that the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack has a longer way to go in getting the BioShock Infinite performance up to scratch.

With a sub-set of the Radeon GPUs I also ran the new vs. old Mesa Git on other games too. However, there didn't end up being any real performance difference as a result of the Mesa Git changes this week. These fresh benchmarks can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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