This Week's Mesa 17.1-dev + Linux 4.11 Radeon Performance vs. NVIDIA

Given all the recent performance work that's landed recently in Mesa Git for Mesa 17.1 plus the Linux 4.11 kernel continuing to mature, in this article are some fresh benchmarks of a few Radeon GPUs with Mesa 17.1-dev + Linux 4.11 as of this week compared to some GeForce graphics cards with the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Basically this article is to serve as a fresh look at the open-source Radeon vs. closed-source NVIDIA Linux gaming performance. The Radeon tests were using the Linux 4.11 kernel as of 20 March and the Mesa 17.1-dev code also as of 20 March. The NVIDIA driver used was the 378.13 release. Ubuntu 16.10 was running on the Core i7 7700K test system.

Graphics cards tested on the AMD side were the Radeon R7 370, RX 480, and R9 Fury. On the NVIDIA side were the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti. In a future article will be some fresh tests with GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards when comparing the AMDGPU vs. Radeon DRM drivers on this hardware. All of these tests were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.