RADV vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan Performance vs. OpenGL In May 2017

With the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver recently hitting the milestone of effectively being Vulkan 1.0 compliant, I figured this warranted a good time for running a fresh open-source Vulkan vs. AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance comparison on various graphics cards. For additional context, the RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL numbers are also present to provide additional value.

AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 was the latest hybrid driver available at the time of testing for this comparison. On the open-source side, Mesa 17.2-dev Git as of this week built against LLVM 5.0 SVN was used via the Padoka PPA. The Linux 4.12 Git kernel was also used on the open-source side for having the newest changes recently merged from DRM-Next.

The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 testing was done via Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for compatibility with the hybrid driver stack. However, the open-source driver tests were done on the same system via Ubuntu 17.04 as both when building Mesa from source and trying the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 16.04, RADV was running into issues with Dota 2 over swap chain issues.

The graphics cards tested for this comparison were the Radeon RX 480, RX 580, and R9 Fury. The Radeon RX 550 was to be tested as RADV last week landed Polaris 12 GPU support, but during my tests the RX 550 on RADV was very unstable and thus was dropped from the testing process.

Vulkan/OpenGL tests ran for this fresh comparison included Dota 2, The Talos Principle, Serious Sam 2017, and Mad Max. All benchmarks were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.