Radeon Software 18.10 vs. Mesa 18.2 RADV/RadeonSI Benchmarks

Last week AMD released Radeon Software 18.10 as their latest official Linux driver release for what previously was referred to as "AMDGPU-PRO" while now also offers the "All-Open" driver option too. For our latest Linux GPU benchmarking is a look at how Radeon Software 18.10 with its closed-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver builds compare to that of the RadeonSI and RADV open-source drivers when testing from the Mesa 18.2-devel state.

Radeon Software 18.10 adds Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS but not yet Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, so that older "Xenial Xerus" build was used. The Radeon Software 18.10 driver indeed was working fine on Ubuntu 16.04.4 with the Linux 4.13 kernel while using the all "PRO" components, which provides Vulkan 1.1 for its AMDVLK-based Vulkan driver and OpenGL 4.5 for its long-standing, closed-source OpenGL driver. Radeon Software / AMDGPU-PRO does not currently work with the newer upstream kernels for its DKMS module builds.

When running the current open-source graphics driver performance tests, the Linux 4.16.6 stable kernel was used for the newest AMDGPU DRM support and via Padoka PPA there was Mesa 18.2-devel built against LLVM 6.0 providing the latest RadeonSI/RADV driver components on top of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

The same Intel Core i7 8700K test system was obviously used throughout. With the two driver stacks the tests were done using a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards. These comparison OpenGL/Vulkan Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.