RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Is Still A Better Bet Than AMDVLK In February 2018

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 12 February 2018 at 03:36 PM EST. Page 1 of 6. 53 Comments.

With the AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan driver that AMD open-sourced in December continuing to be updated in weekly batches with new Vulkan extensions / features / performance optimizations and the RADV Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to march to its own beat, I have spent the past few days conducting some fresh benchmarks between the AMDVLK and RADV Vulkan drivers with RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

Since the debut of AMDVLK that happened just before Christmas this official AMD Radeon Vulkan driver that shares its code-base with the Windows driver has continued to get better with more performance tweaks, several more Vulkan extensions being supported, better Vega GPU support, etc. But at the same time RADV continues seeing very frequent commits to Mesa for tidying up the code, finishing out recent extension implementations, and also working on more performance tweaks from Bas and Dave as well as the Valve Linux driver developers.

This latest round of benchmarking began this weekend using the latest XGL/AMDVLK changes. The Mesa Git was also as of this weekend for RADV. Testing was done using Linux 4.16 Git as of this weekend to have the very newest AMDGPU DRM bits.

The testing was done from a Ryzen 7 1800X box and the graphics cards tested included the Radeon RX 560, RX 580, and RX Vega 64.

AMDVLK vs. RADV February 2018

Available Vulkan Linux games that are benchmark-friendly were used via the Phoronix Test Suite including Dota 2, Dawn of War 3, Mad Max, Serious Sam 3 BFE, Talos Principle, and F1 2017.


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