Fresh Mesa 11.3-devel RadeonSI Tests On Ubuntu 16.04 vs. NVIDIA's 364.19 Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 28 April 2016 at 03:38 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 16 Comments.

For some end-of-month benchmarks and while having a number of graphics cards out prior to being let down by Tomb Raider's Linux benchmark, here is a fresh round of OpenGL tests while using the newest Mesa 11.3-devel code on RadeonSI with AMDGPU/Radeon DRM from Ubuntu 16.04 and then compared to various Kepler/Maxwell graphics cards with the newest NVIDIA Linux driver.

From the Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 installation, the Padoka PPA was deployed for getting Mesa 11.3-devel as of this week built against LLVM 3.9 SVN. With this setup, it's offering OpenGL 4.2 support for AMD GCN hardware / RadeonSI. Ubuntu 16.04 is using the Linux 4.4 kernel but has all of the Radeon/AMDGPU back-ported DRM driver code from Linux 4.5. The AMD cards I had available for testing were the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, R7 370, and R9 Fury.

On the NVIDIA side I was using the recently released NVIDIA 364.19 stable release. The cards available for testing there were the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 970, and GTX 980 Ti.

A few different Linux OpenGL benchmarks were run for this fun article. Unfortunately there aren't any new Tomb Raider results as Feral confirmed they will not be porting over the Windows CLI options for the game to Linux. Some of our other usual OpenGL benchmarking suspects like Metro Redux sadly were left out due to Steam game updates breaking the support. All of this benchmarking was done in a completely reproducible and automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.


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