Open-Source AMD Radeon Linux Graphics In Great Shape For Workstations, Handily Beating Proprietary Driver

In the case of the SOLIDWORKS-07 viewset with SPECViewPerf 2020, the stock Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS drivers hadn't successfully completed the test but did work fine on the newer Mesa driver code. Mesa 22.1-dev also offered better performance than the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver.

While SPECViewPerf 2020 was the primary focus, I also ran some fresh tests with the ParaView workstation visualization software:

RadeonSI continued to lead... See all of these workstation-focused graphics benchmarks via this result page.

Across all of the benchmark test cases and all of the resolutions tested, the Radeon RX 6800 performance saw roughly 35% higher performance with the latest AMD open-source driver stack compared to the latest proprietary OpenGL driver found in their Radeon Software for Linux driver package. Even the Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS state with its HWE stack was in good shape against the proprietary OpenGL driver while moving to the newer Mesa 22.1-devel state yielded an 8% improvement thanks to AMD's ongoing open-source work.

For at least recent GPUs, the RadeonSI OpenGL (and open-source Vulkan drivers) are in great shape compared to the proprietary driver code. The proprietary OpenGL driver code seems to become more and more "legacy" with the continued open-source successes seen by AMD. However, we'll presumably see the proprietary OpenGL driver continue to be offered for those with select workstation/legacy applications where there may be some performance advantages and if still needing to maintain largely the same OpenGL driver code-base for Windows. But most AMD Radeon Linux users these days are by far best off using the fully open-source graphics driver stack.