How The AMD Polaris Open-Source Driver Performance Has Evolved Since Launch

If you've been wondering how the AMDGPU+RadeonSI open-source driver stack has evolved since the hardware publicly launched, I ran some fresh benchmarks this weekend comparing my current driver numbers to that of my original Radeon RX 470 Linux review.

What we have to look at this Sunday is the open-source driver stack from early August on the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 OC with Linux 4.8 and Mesa 12.1-dev compared to the state today with Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN Git and Linux 4.8.4 stable (since only recently the Linux 4.9 AMDGPU fallout has been getting cleaned up).

Various OpenGL benchmarks were compared to the original numbers on the same Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard, and 16GB of RAM. Besides the performance, back in August this open-source driver stack only supported OpenGL 4.3 while now it has all GL 4.4/4.5 extensions although it doesn't formally advertise the new versions yet pending conformance. There's also been the mainlining of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver too that works on the RX 470.

There's been some nice performance improvements to RadeonSI/Mesa over just the past 2~3 months!



Less noticeable in some tests though.

Tesseract performance has even improved.

BioShock Infinite saw some significant optimizations recently.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive seems to have slightly regressed.

If you find these tests interesting and would like to see more unique Linux/open-source benchmarks on Phoronix, consider joining Phoronix Premium or making a tip this weekend.