The Current RADV/RadeonSI Performance With Mesa 19.1 + Linux 5.1

Following this week's testing of the Radeon Linux gaming performance between Ubuntu 18.10 and 19.04, I also ran some benchmarks on the Ubuntu 19.04 when manually switching over to the bleeding-edge Mesa 19.1 RADV/RadeonSI drivers paired with the Linux 5.1 Git kernel. Is that worthwhile for "Disco Dingo" users to gain better AMD Linux gaming performance?

After finishing up the Ubuntu 19.04 benchmarks with its Linux 5.0 + Mesa 19.0 stack, I used the Oibaf PPA for Mesa 19.1-devel built against LLVM 8.0 and then also switched over to Linux 5.1 using the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. Sadly the Radeon VII graphics were still problematic at least for my card, but I figured it would be interesting to test with the other Polaris/Vega cards to see if those bleeding-edge drivers are worthwhile for those on Ubuntu 19.04 or other recent distros.

But at least with the Linux games tested, it didn't end up being all that useful.

In most scenarios, the Radeon RX Vega 56/64 were about the same (or slightly faster) while the mature RX 580 Polaris tended to perform the same or regress in a few cases.





The RADV Vulkan driver at least was performing slightly better in a few of the newer Vulkan-powered Linux games.


But I didn't encounter any major breakthroughs. But at least new features/functionality may tempt you to run Mesa 19.1, but at least in these RX 580 and Vega 56/64 tests with the common Linux games, there were no major benefits that would really warrant someone upgrading to Ubuntu 19.04 to necessarily want to be riding Mesa Git at the moment.

The ParaView performance did remain regressed, an issue spotted in the earlier 18.10 vs. 19.04 benchmarks.

See more OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.