Radeon RX 560 Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 22 May 2017 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 16 Comments.

Last week the "Polaris Evolved" Radeon RX 560 graphics card launched. I picked up a Sapphire Radeon RX 560 for Linux testing and have those results to share today for OpenGL and Vulkan workloads under Linux using the 4.12 development kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev compared to a range of Radeon and GeForce graphics cards.

The Radeon RX 560 boasts 16 compute units, up to 2.6 TFLOPS compute power, 128-bit memory interface, and comes in 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 varieties. The version I picked up for testing had 4GB of vRAM. The RX 560 has a reference clock of 1175MHz and the boost clock is 1275MHz.

Over the previous RX 460, the RX 560 has two more compute units enabled, 896 vs. 1024 streaming processors. The TDP went from 75 Watts on the RX 460 to 80 Watts with the RX 560, with this Sapphire card having a 6-pin PCI-E power connector. AMD views the RX 560 more as a replacement to the R7 360 than the RX 460.

The card I picked up for testing was the Sapphire Radeon RX 560 with 4GB of vRAM (100413P4GOCL). The boost clock on this $115 USD card tops out at 1300MHz. The card has DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity. This Sapphire Radeon RX 560 is a dual-slot card and has a single, relatively quiet fan.

For this fresh round of benchmarking the Radeon RX 560 was tested on the Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev configuration (via the Padoka PPA for Mesa 17.2-dev + LLVM 5.0), as were the other tested Radeon cards including the Radeon R7 260X, R7 370, RX 460, RX 480, RX 550, RX 560, and RX 580. On the NVIDIA side was the 381.22 driver release tested with the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 1050, and GTX 1050 Ti.

A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were run on this assortment of NVIDIA and AMD hardware using the Phoronix Test Suite. As a reminder with this being one of the graphics cards I've purchased as opposed to being a review sample, if you appreciate all of our Linux benchmarking please consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium. Performance-per-Watt, GPU thermal, and performance-per-dollar results follow the raw performance benchmark results.


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