Total War: WARHAMMER - AMD RadeonSI Linux Performance

Shortly after Total War: WARHAMMER was released for Linux by Feral Interactive we had out NVIDIA Linux WARHAMMER benchmarks. Now having more time since that OpenGL Linux game port release on Tuesday, here are benchmarks when using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack with various AMD GCN graphics cards.

Aside from testing the complete open-source AMD Linux graphics stack, I had also attempted to run Total War: WARHAMMER with the AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 hybrid driver. Aside form having the warning when launching the game that it was unsupported -- and Feral not advertising AMDGPU-PRO support -- I decided to try it anyways. AMDGPU-PRO got to the main menu and it looked like things might be working, but regardless of visual quality level or resolution, whenever launching the benchmark mode the game would crash immediately. Thus for this article are just RadeonSI tests due to being unable to complete any Total War: WARHAMMER tests successfully with AMDGPU-PRO.

The AMD graphics cards tested for this comparison included the Radeon HD 7950, Radeon R9 270X, Radeon R9 285, Radeon R7 370, Radeon RX 460, Radeon RX 480, and Radeon R9 Fury.

All of the AMD tests were done from a Linux 4.9 Git kernel as of 21 November, amdgpu 1.2.0, and Mesa 13.1-dev built against LLVM 4.0 SVN as of 21 November. Feral Interactive has made it clear the game is only supported with the open-source AMD driver stack when using Mesa 13.0.1 and at least LLVM 3.9 for the AMDGPU compiler back-end. The Mesa Git was from 21 November, which doesn't include the very latest RadeonSI work that landed over night, which some have since reported does boost the WARHAMMER performance. If that's indeed the case, I will post some comparison benchmarks of that shortly.

With these AMD results are comparisons to the NVIDIA 375.20 numbers with the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. All NVIDIA and AMD tests were done respectively with the configurations shown in the system table.

With all of the basics covered, let's go look at the benchmark results.