AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 vs. Mesa 11.3 + Linux 4.6: Very Competitive For Linux Gamers

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 24 May 2016 at 12:20 PM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 30 Comments.

Following last week's AMDGPU-PRO 16.20.3 "Beta 2" driver release of AMD's new hybrid driver stack for Linux that makes use of the AMDGPU open-source kernel DRM driver with the closed-source OpenGL driver derived from Catalyst / Radeon Software, I set out to do a fresh open vs. closed-source driver comparison. For the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, and R9 Fury, I compared the performance of this new AMDGPU-PRO driver against Mesa 11.3-devel Git and Linux 4.6 for the latest open-source driver stack.

From the same system, the Mesa 11.3-devel and Linux 4.6 open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack as of last week was compared to the new AMDGPU-PRO Beta 2 driver on Ubuntu 16.04. With the Tonga, Hawaii, and Fiji graphics cards tested on each driver, I ran a variety of OpenGL benchmarks for this comparison. OpenCL benchmarks weren't done due to the poor state of the OpenCL Gallium3D support, but if you want fresh AMDGPU-PRO CL numbers against NVIDIA, see the OpenCL benchmarks from earlier today.

AMD Open-Source vs. Mesa 11.3 RadeonSI 4K Linux Comparison

All the OpenGL benchmarks for this comparison were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. A wide variety of tests were carried out, first at 1080p followed by 4K.


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