AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 vs. RADV/RadeonSI Radeon Linux Gaming Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 vs. RADV/RadeonSI Radeon Linux Gaming Performance

With today's AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 Linux driver release alongside the Radeon Software Adrenalin Driver for Windows users, it's significant in a few ways. First and foremost, AMD has stuck to their word of the past two years and is now able to open-source their official Vulkan Linux driver. When it comes to AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 itself you are now able to mix-and-match driver components to choose what pieces you want of AMD's somewhat complicated driver make-up. Additionally, their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in 17.50 have some new feature capabilities. So with that said here's a fresh look at how the AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 professional driver performance compares to the latest open-source RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25659

[jrch2k8]

so in resume if you have any AMD card except Vega, RADV basically catched up is most games and is pretty much moot to use AMD Vk driver, if you have Vega then AMD Vk is kinda faster for now(I mean giving how Polaris and below generations are performing now and seeing how recent Vega support landed in RADV).

On OpenGL is an all hands down beating all around, so no need for PRO OpenGL outside enterprise or stuff that need compatibility profiles(pretty much what is designed for, so no surprise)

On OpenCL I guess PRO is the only option for now until Rocm lands on LLVM and the mainline Kernel.

Anyway congrats to AMD

[Herem]

Wow after all this time this was unexpected news, Christmas seems to have turned up a couple of weeks early. Well done AMD for your continued support of open source drivers.

[mphuZ]

No way. AMD Vulkan is ahead of RADV to 20 fps...

[shmerl]

What is the name of AMD's own Vulkan driver, adrenalinv?

[Michael]

What is the name of AMD's own Vulkan driver, adrenalinv?

Last I heard their lawyers have yet to sign off on an official name for it and the closest has been "Radeon Open Vulkan", or something to avoid confusion with RADV.

[smitty3268]

So to summarize,

GL: Pro drivers are extremely slow, only use them if you have to (workstation apps?)

Vulkan: pro drivers are about 10% faster, but require custom LLVM, etc. and crash on certain games. Radv works out of the box, but a bit slower.

The question is still how well/easy is it to install the pro vulkan driver along with the open source GL drivers. As long as that isn't easy, then everyone should stick with the open GL drivers and whatever comes along with them since that's what 99% of apps and games currently use and it's so much better than the pro GL driver.

CL: still need the pro drivers to get anything useful here.

[schmidtbag]

Just a thought:
As we've all noticed, the radeonSI OGL performance is significantly better than the pro drivers. If the pro drivers are fundamentally shared with Windows and the Vulkan drivers perform better than RADV, this gets me to wonder if there is actually a lot more un-tapped potential for Vulkan. After all, RADV did win in some tests (particularly with the Fury). Of course, I do realize that there may be no correlation at all - Vulkan is a very different beast.

[mlau]

so in resume if you have any AMD card except Vega, RADV basically catched up is most games and is pretty much moot to use AMD Vk driver, if you have Vega then AMD Vk is kinda faster for now(I mean giving how Polaris and below generations are performing now and seeing how recent Vega support landed in RADV).

On OpenGL is an all hands down beating all around, so no need for PRO OpenGL outside enterprise or stuff that need compatibility profiles(pretty much what is designed for, so no surprise)

really, after seeing these numbers, i'd reassign the remaining (linux) pro gl driver developers to mesa and task them with ensuring it flawlessly runs whatever enterprise customers are throwing at it.

the vulkan driver's low performance is surprising, though, given that the codebase is shared with windows. either the linux part was neglected, or the hardware
could perform a lot better on windows too, as demonstrated by radv being faster most of the time.

[chimpy]

Feral put some work into RADV and it shows in these benchmarks; Dawn of war and F1 are also Feral games and didn't even work on AMD's driver. Hopefully the RADV guys can catch up.

PS: Why wasn't the AMD Vulkan driver opensource to begin with like Intel's? Or does Intel have 2 separate Vulkan drivers (sorry can't remember if they do)?