Radeon Windows 10 vs. Linux RadeonSI/RADV Gaming Performance

On Monday I published a Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance comparison with NVIDIA GeForce graphics while today the tables have turned and is a Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmark battle with AMD Radeon graphics.

Tested for this Radeon cross-OS comparison was a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury graphics cards. Under Windows 10 Pro x64 the latest Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.1.2 driver release was used for testing. On the Linux side with Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 the only option is using the open-source driver stack. The latest RadeonSI/RADV driver stack was tested via the Linux 4.10 Git kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev Git (built with LLVM 5.0 SVN, via the Padoka PPA) using these latest Git components as of the end of this past weekend.

Like with the NVIDIA graphics tests, a range of cross-platform games were tested including Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, GRID Autosport, Metro Last Light Redux, Shadow of Mordor, Civilization VI, Tomb Raider, Total War: WARHAMMER, and others. With The Talos Principle there is also some cross-platform Vulkan benchmark coverage. Also some of our older OpenGL cross-platform tests were run like Unigine.

The same hardware, of course, was used throughout the entire testing process and besides the R9 Fury / RX 480 consisted of the Intel Core i7 7700K, MSI Z270A-PRO motherboard, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3200MHz memory, and Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD 256GB.

With many of these popular, cross-platform games tested, they don't meet our strict automation/reproducible test requirements thus aren't tested on a daily basis at Phoronix. Thus a lot of manual processes were involved in carrying out all of this testing. If you enjoy all of the benchmarks carried out daily at Phoronix, please consider joining Phoronix Premium. Among the benefits are being able to view the site ad-free and seeing multi-page articles (such as this lengthy article) on a single page. Thanks for your support and/or viewing this site without ad-blockers.