AMDGPU DRM For Linux 4.7 Will Bring Some Performance Boosts For The R9 Fury

Yesterday I published some Radeon DRM-Next performance tests for the Radeon DRM code queued up for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window. Today I'm testing the DRM-Next-4.7 code for AMDGPU for looking at the performance improvements coming to this newer AMD DRM driver with the next Linux kernel cycle. The DRM-Next-4.7 performance was compared to Linux 4.6 in this article for a Tonga and Fiji graphics card.

The Radeon R9 285 (Tonga) and Radeon R9 Fury (Fiji) are the two GCN 1.2 graphics cards I have that work with the AMDGPU kernel driver out-of-the-box. I tested these two graphics cards on the same system where I was doing the Radeon DRM-Next-4.7 benchmarking. Mesa 11.3-devel, xf86-video-modesetting, and X.Org Server 1.18.3 were running on the system. The vanilla Linux 4.6-rc7 AMDGPU DRM was tested and compared to the AMDGPU code that's planned for integration during the Linux 4.7 merge window.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks were of course run in a fully-automated manner via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. If you aren't familiar with the AMDGPU changes coming, see my feature overview of the AMDGPU DRM for Linux 4.7.