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.

The benchmarks in this article are of the just-released AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 driver when opting for the "PRO" components to obtain their closed-source OpenGL driver and their official Vulkan driver, which is their driver being open-sourced. That AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 stack was then compared to the pure "open-source" components of Mesa 17.4-dev Git providing RADV/RadeonSI while Linux 4.15 Git provides the very newest AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver code.

These two Linux driver stacks were tested with the Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 for this comparison.

Then for some NVIDIA reference points are the GeForce GTX 1060 / GTX 1070 / GTX 1070 Ti / GTX 1080 / GTX 1080 Ti tested from the latest NVIDIA 387.34 driver.

All of these tests were done from an Intel Core i7 8700K + ASUS PRIME Z370-A + 16GB DDR4-3200 + Samsung 950 PRO 256GB NVMe box running Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS with the P-State performance governor. Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS was used as AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 does not support the latest Ubuntu 17.10 release.