Mesa 17.1-dev vs. AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 vs. NVIDIA 378 Linux Gaming Tests

Following last week's AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 hybrid driver release I delivered some early AMDGPU-PRO vs. AMDGPU+RadeonSI benchmark results using the newest driver code. After a few more days of testing, in this article is a larger OpenGL and Vulkan comparison when testing AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 and AMDGPU+RadeonSI of Mesa 17.1 + Linux 4.10 on various Radeon GPUs. On the NVIDIA side are fresh GeForce tests with the company's newest 378.09 beta driver.

The AMDGPU + RadeonSI testing on Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.1-dev (via the Padoka PPA, built against LLVM SVN) was done atop Ubuntu 16.10. The NVIDIA testing with the 378.09 driver was done as well on Ubuntu 16.10. For the AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 testing the system was re-installed with Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS due to AMD not yet supporting AMDGPU-PRO on newer kernel releases / Ubuntu 16.10. The same system was used throughout testing with the Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5, MSI C236A WORKSTATION, 16GB DDR4, and 256GB Toshiba RD480.

The AMD cards tested with both drivers were the R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. The NVIDIA cards tested were the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The cards tested were using the newest cards I had available from each vendor.

All of these OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Our next Windows vs. Linux AMD/NVIDIA graphics comparison is also coming up in the days ahead.