RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Is Still A Better Bet Than AMDVLK In February 2018

First up was Dota 2, the second game on Linux with a Vulkan renderer following The Talos Principle. With Dota 2 the frame-rates for the Polaris RX 560 and RX 580 graphics cards are about the same between these competing open-source Radeon Vulkan drivers. But with the high-end Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card, it's RADV that is actually noticeably faster than AMD's own AMDVLK driver for this latest-generation GPU.

The CPU usage also was slightly lower when using RADV than AMDVLK. (There aren't CPU usage metrics for the RX 560 just due to an oversight.)

When running Dawn of War 3 at 1080p with low quality settings, the RX 560 performance was comparable on the two drivers while the RX 580 was noticeably faster with the RADV driver. On the RX Vega 64, using AMDVLK would yield a hang while RADV was working out fine.

When running with high image quality settings, RADV was faster with both Polaris graphics cards while AMDVLK still wouldn't run this game stable with Vega.

When running Dawn of War 3 at 4K, the performance was now similar between AMDVLK and RADV except for the RX Vega 64 only running stable on RADV.