Radeon's Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Has Nearly Caught Up With Windows' Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon's Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Has Nearly Caught Up With Windows' Driver

Over the past few months we have seen some incredible progress made to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as AMDGPU (and the RADV Vulkan driver, though not the focus of today's article) as well as the Mesa 3D stack as a whole. The open-source Radeon Linux driver is much faster now than where it was last year and is becoming competitive with NVIDIA's Linux driver performance. For seeing how close the AMDGPU+RadeonSI stack is now to Windows, here are some fresh benchmarks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=24756

[jrch2k8]

freaking awesome, TY AMD team and RADV team you rock

[schmidtbag]

Wow this is impressive. And yet there are still more performance improvements to be done. It's interesting how Linux's performance seems to get worse (compared to Windows) as the graphics quality goes up.

I'm personally curious where the open-source drivers stand when only looking at games that were "ported properly". In other words, there are games where even the closed-source Nvidia drivers seem to have roughly the same performance gap as the AMD drivers - these games aren't a good metric of driver capability. From what I recall, I think Shadow of Mordor was one of these games.

[ThanosRules]

Wow that's really impressive!

I'm not a premium member, so I don't really have the right to do any requests, but would you be able to do any benchmark comparison between Fedora 26, Arch/Antergos and Tumbleweed? I've heard many people (opensuse guys usually) to say that Fedora has poor gaming performance. It would be really interesting to see if there are actually any differences in performance, now that all of the above have the same kernel and mesa version.

[andre30correia]

A good job, again AMD stop with fgrlx/amdgpupro and put your resourges in opensource drivers.

[prazola]

I have both an r9 390x and a 7970. I just tested Superposition 1080p extreme for the 7970 with this results:
ArchLinux mesa-git: 1735
Windows OpenGL: 1643
Windows DX11: 2100
This is amazing!
I would like to see a mesa control panel as well, or cli tool at least. Something official with all the features needed like tessellation amount, AO, AA and AF override etc.

[bug77]

Apparently still not fast enough to benchmark alongside Nvidia :P
And I won't even mention the still missing functionality. Not a word about Vulkan. Or HDMI audio.

So yeah, great strides, but there's still distance to cover.

[Azrael5]

Also better in several cases.

[MuPuF]

Wow this is impressive. And yet there are still more performance improvements to be done. It's interesting how Linux's performance seems to get worse (compared to Windows) as the graphics quality goes up.

This is the sign of a bad compiler ... or that different shaders got fed to the GPU either because the proprietary driver has hand-optimised versions or because the game does not present the same shader (improper port).

[Space Beer]

Apparently still not fast enough to benchmark alongside Nvidia :P
And I won't even mention the still missing functionality. Not a word about Vulkan. Or HDMI audio.

So yeah, great strides, but there's still distance to cover.

HDMI audio works great on older cards. At least on my R7 260X

Great job. That's why I'll stick to Radeon, even though I don't care about gaming performace on linux :d