Superposition Shows How Far RadeonSI Gallium3D Has Evolved vs. AMDGPU-PRO

Comparing the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO proprietary Linux driver to the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver stack with the newly-released OpenGL 4.5-using Unigine Superposition has shown how far the open-source driver stack has come.

When Unigine Corp's past benchmarks / tech demos were released, they had tough times running due to issues and their performance on the open-source driver stacks ended up being well lower than the proprietary driver, particularly with Catalyst at the time. But with this week's Superposition release, RadeonSI Gallium3D not only works, but its performance is very competitive with the binary OpenGL driver from AMD.

Unigine Superposition is one beautiful but demanding OpenGL workload for Windows and Linux.

I ran some AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 vs. Mesa 17.1-dev RadeonSI (and Linux 4.11 DRM) tests on an Ubuntu 16.10 system using a Radeon RX 480, R9 Fury, and R9 290. In this article are Superposition benchmarks while an article coming out today is providing more benchmarks of AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, which was released by AMD at the end of last week.

With low quality settings at 1080p, the R9 290 is actually faster on the pure open-source Radeon driver than AMDGPU-PRO. But with the RX 480 Polaris and R9 Fury Fiji, the AMDGPU-PRO driver was faster.

As the intensity increased, RadeonSI on the RX 480 and R9 Fury was getting closer to the AMDGPU-PRO performance level.

The R9 290 on RadeonSI remained in front.

At 4K with low quality settings, the R9 Fury was running roughly the same on both driver stacks. Great to see RadeonSI advancing so much and there still is more work in the air for further improving RadeonSI and the AMDGPU DRM driver.