RADV Vulkan vs. RadeonSI OpenGL Performance With Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.3-dev

It's been a few weeks since last delivering any large RADV/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux graphics benchmark results due to being busy with testing other hardware as well as battling some regressions / stability problems within the AMDGPU DRM code and Mesa Git. But with Linux 4.13 stable and the newest Mesa 17.3-dev code, things are playing well so here are some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on three Radeon graphics cards.

Linux 4.14 Git was exhibiting some AMDGPU stability issues as was the amd-staging-drm-next code with the DC patches, so for this comparison I was using Linux 4.13 stable. As well, that also means no RX Vega benchmarks in this article due to not having the DC support. I'll try the latest kernel code again in a few days to see if the situation is cleared up. At least the latest Mesa 17.3-dev code as of yesterday from the Padoka PPA is in good shape and running well, built against LLVM 6.0 SVN.

For low and high-end GPU testing of this RADV Vulkan vs. RadeonSI OpenGL driver comparison were the RX 560, RX 580, and R9 Fury graphics cards for testing. The benchmark-friendly Linux games with OpenGL and Vulkan renderers currently available for testing included Dota 2, Dawn of War 3, Mad Max, Serious Sam 3: BFE, and Talos Principle. All testing was facilitated by the Phoronix Test Suite.