A Preliminary Look At Radeon RX 6800 XT Windows Performance vs. Open-Source Linux Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Preliminary Look At Radeon RX 6800 XT Windows Performance vs. Open-Source Linux Drivers

For those wondering how the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers compare to the Radeon Software Windows drivers for the recently released Radeon RX 6800 XT, here are some preliminary data points looking at the OpenGL / Vulkan performance between Windows and Linux for RDNA 2.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=29768

[schmidtbag]

I'm kinda surprised by this. Compared to Windows, the results aren't all that bad, but the Windows results weren't very good for OpenGL or compute so it is a little concerning. But, there are more driver updates coming up and at least these GPUs are actually usable so early on, so I'm feeling hopeful.

[sykobee]

For open source benchmarks on Linux for a GPU I am fairly impressed. The card hasn't been out long either.

It's clear that there must be areas of improvement for the Linux drivers where Windows performs a lot better, but maybe they utilise methods or licensed code that AMD can't put into the open source drivers, or it's simply driver architecture differences.

[andyprough]

Why not do this with a proper distro, instead of Ubuntu?

Because Ubuntu is the Windows 10 of distros.

[duby229]

For open source benchmarks on Linux for a GPU I am fairly impressed. The card hasn't been out long either.

It's clear that there must be areas of improvement for the Linux drivers where Windows performs a lot better, but maybe they utilise methods or licensed code that AMD can't put into the open source drivers, or it's simply driver architecture differences.

As far as Vulkan goes, I suspect ACO needs to get tuned for RDNA2 yet and then I fully expect it to kick ass. As for OpenGL, AMD's proprietary OpenGL driver seriously sucks ass, I doubt their open source compiler has been really tuned for RDNA2 just yet either, but it still rocked their proprietary driver. And as for OpenCL, I don't like ROCm, I think it needs to be seriously re-thought, We need people to contribute to Clover right away, it's waaaay past due for Clover to become full featured, it must happen.

[Brisse]

Thanks for including the dx11-results whenever applicable. Some people might read things out of context whenever those benchmarks are omitted.

[marios]

The Linux vs windows on nvidia's blob whould also be interesting. It might even prove that the nvidia driver is optimized for windows while it is crapware on linux.

[mannerov]

One has to keep in mind that Unigine Heaven and Valley opengl and directx11 backend might be different. For example I have noticed with apitrace that the heaviest shader in directx 9 is replaced by two shaders (and the texture formats changed as well) in the opengl backend. There might be similar things for directx 11 vs opengl.

[cmakeshift]

Some years ago, having such comparable results for Mesa drivers for a high-end card was a pipedream. Let alone for a card that was just released.

Thanks to the community, and thanks to AMD. This is beautiful.

[tildearrow]

AMD supports Windows better than Linux!
In fact, they have the fastest DirectX driver on Earth... (come on, why not port DirectX 10-12 to native Linux?)
Even they forgot about Vulkan in the card's info page!

.....except that:

Windows: faster
Windows in actual use: the slowest thing ever made

Linux: slower
Linux in actual user: blazing fast