Ubuntu 17.10 Radeon Performance: Stock vs. X-Swat Updates vs. Oibaf PPA vs. Pkppa vs. Padoka PPA

The Talos Principle with OpenGL also hasn't seen any performance tuning work recently.

Unigine Superposition can see some small performance benefits out of Mesa 17.4-dev.

Between the PPA options with working RADV Vulkan driver performance, the results right now are mostly similar.

That's the quick story of the popular PPA choices on Ubuntu 17.10 for newer Mesa graphics driver support. As mentioned already, at this stage there are some minor performance boosts in some games, but as usual as the Mesa releases get old, using the PPAs can be much more beneficial. Mesa 17.2 remains the current stable series while the Mesa 17.3 release is imminent and there isn't yet too many differences out of Mesa 17.4 (or what should become known as Mesa 18.0). But in the weeks/months ahead with Ubuntu 17.10 sticking to Mesa 17.2, using these PPAs can have a much greater impact for obtaining the newest Mesa driver bits until the time of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS when the cycle starts over. If sticking to Ubuntu Long Term Support releases is another place where these PPAs are supported and beneficial due to their Mesa stacks being more stale until the LTS point releases that back-port the Mesa/kernel hardware enablement stacks for temporarily better driver support.