Open-Source Radeon Performance Is Very Good For DiRT Rally On Linux

DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral's increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

Feral's minimum system requirements note a Radeon R9 270 as being required although they don't mention an AMD GPU as part of their recommended requirements. For the driver coverage they say Mesa 13.0.2 or later is needed for DiRT Rally on Linux.

I've been testing RadeonSI with DiRT Rally the past day and it's been working out well in my tests thus far. There is one caveat and that is there is a known performance regression with Mesa 17.1-devel for DiRT Rally. Feral recommends Mesa ~13.0.4 as a safe place for running this racing game for best performance. On the next page I have a few test results for those curious about the potential performance loss if using Mesa 17.1-dev. Feral has been aware of this regression and so hopefully it will be addressed within Mesa shortly.

With my testing when making use of Linux 4.9 and Mesa 13.0, the performance has been better than I expected for this new racing game to Linux. It runs rather well as shown by the test results.

For this round of benchmarking I tested the following Radeon GPUs:

- Radeon HD 7950
- Radeon R9 270X
- Radeon R9 285
- Radeon R7 370
- Radeon RX 460
- Radeon RX 480
- Radeon R9 Fury

I also included a few NVIDIA results for reference purposes, including the GTX 980, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. For more NVIDIA DiRT Rally Linux benchmarks, see our 14-way GeForce DiRT Rally comparison published this morning.