Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

Earlier this week I published some benchmark results showing Mesa 10.5-devel delivering Intel performance changes compared to Mesa 10.3 as found in Ubuntu 14.10. The next logical step to this testing is looking at the AMD Radeon graphics results for the R600g and RadeonSI drivers using multiple graphics cards while seeing what the open-source Radeon Linux driver has to offer if upgrading past what's shipped in Ubuntu 14.10 and other recent Linux distribution releases.

The tests in this article offer a look at Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit upgraded to the Linux 3.18 kernel in its current development state and then comparing the performance of the user-space graphics components. The stock Ubuntu 14.10 user-space stack of Mesa 10.3.0 + LLVM 3.5 was tested followed by switching over the Mesa 10.5-devel Git from this week along with LLVM 3.6 SVN. This testing allows seeing how the Mesa drivers (and to some extent the AMD GPU LLVM back-end) have advanced recently. Mesa 10.4 was just branched from Git master earlier this month so these 10.5-devel results aren't far off (if at all) from the performance levels you'll be able to find in Mesa 10.4.0 when released in December.

The graphics cards tested in this article using the AMD R600g Gallium3D driver was the Radeon HD 6570 and Radeon HD 6870. The newer GCN-based hardware tested on RadeonSI Gallium3D were the Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon R9 270X.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks used in this Radeon Mesa comparison were facilitated by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.