AMDGPU+RadeonSI With Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, One Week Later

Last week marked the highly anticipated release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux. At launch it only offered official support for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the AMD support being less than stellar. While the open-source Linux graphics driver Git code is quick to move along and adapt for new games, a new Phoronix Premium member requested some tests for seeing how the latest code is now working for this demanding AAA Linux game ported by Feral Interactive.

Correct rendering with the NVIDIA Linux driver.

In always seeking to satisfy the test requests of those supporting our Linux hardware testing / benchmarking efforts via the ad-free Phoronix Premium service, I ran some tests on Deus Ex: MD using the latest Linux 4.9 Git code as of 10 November as well as the latest LLVM 4.0 + Mesa 13.1-devel Git code from the Padoka PPA also as of yesterday.

Tests at the same high quality level with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as of this week.

Tests were done with our stock deus-exmd test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite. The performance remains very slow even with low quality settings, particularly when it comes to the shader compilation time. Having an on-disk shader cache for the RadeonSI driver really can't come soon enough for the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is also one of the games that makes use of some OpenGL AZDO extensions when available, most of which are sadly unsupported currently by the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. So right now it's pretty painful when attempting to use the mainline Git code, but should be better in the future.

When using the low quality settings as outlined in the Deus Ex test profile, the game renders everything nearly fine while at the higher image quality settings is when there are rendering defects (as shown in the screenshots on this page), aside from the very low performance.