Linux 4.18 AMDGPU Tests: Vega Taking A Hit

Being roughly mid-way through the Linux 4.18 kernel development cycle, I spent some time this weekend running benchmarks of the AMDGPU DRM driver on Linux 4.18 Git compared to Linux 4.17 stable on three different Radeon graphics cards while using the Mesa 18.1.3 based drivers.

If you are not familiar with the Linux 4.18 features, a fair amount is in store on the AMDGPU front. The open-source AMD Radeon Linux kernel driver now has support for the yet-to-be-released Vega 20 graphics card, initial support for the Vega M graphics found within Intel Kabylake-G processors, Vega power profile support and other clocking/power options, initial Vega/GFX9 support in the AMDKFD code, and other enhancements.

Curious about any performance changes, I ran benchmarks of Linux 4.17.5 and Linux 4.18 Git (7 July) on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system that was using Mesa 18.1.3 stable via the Pkppa archive. The three graphics cards up for testing were the Radeon RX 580, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of benchmarks were carried out using the RADV Vulkan and OpenGL RadeonSI drivers with the two kernels under test.