AMD RadeonSI & R600g Gallium3D Tests On Mesa 11.0 + DRM-Next

As some new Mesa 11.0 benchmarks to publish is looking at the performance of several Radeon GPUs on the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers as tested out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 15.04 with the Linux 3.19 kernel and Mesa 10.5.2, then compared to the DRM-Next code for Linux 4.3 plus Mesa 11.0-rc1.

This article is offering up some initial tests in looking at the performance of Ubuntu 15.04 vs. the latest open-source AMD graphics stack. The DRM-Next, Mesa 11.0 branch, and LLVM 3.8.0 SVN code were all built from source on 26 August to provide the freshest graphics experience.

Test coverage of the R600g driver was provided by the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6950 while the RadeonSI driver was stressed by the Radeon R9 290 and Radeon R7 370. With Mesa 11.0, RadeonSI has OpenGL 4.1 compliance (when built with LLVM 3.7+) while R600g remains at OpenGL 3.3.

Due to comparing to the older version of Mesa for this comparison, our usual Linux OpenGL benchmarks were run while in a separate Mesa 11.0 comparison we'll run the RadeonSI hardware with some OpenGL 4 workloads. All benchmarks were conducted in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.