AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Radeon Vega Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Gaming Benchmarks
Here are our initial performance figures for the Vega graphics found on the newly-released Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APU under Linux and testing both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks. CPU tests as well as benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G under Linux are forthcoming on Phoronix.
I only received the Ryzen 5 2400G hours ago for the retail model I had purchased, so this is just the very preliminary benchmark figures to share right now. Tomorrow and in the days ahead will be a lot more coverage to come for the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G models under Linux on Ubuntu and other distributions.
The Ryzen 5 2400G is the current top-end Raven Ridge desktop APU that features four CPU cores / eight threads at a 3.6GHz base frequency and 3.9GHz turbo frequency. This 65 Watt APU has Vega 11 graphics meaning 11 cores / 704 streaming processors and the GPU has a base frequency of 1250MHz. The Ryzen 5 2400G supports dual-channel DDR4 up to 2933MHz.
The Ryzen 5 2400G carries a launch price of $169 USD, at least that's what it was supposed to be. When buying it on launch day from NewEgg with not receiving a review sample, this model ended up costing $189 USD while the Ryzen 3 2200G came in at its suggested price of $99 USD.
Linux Driver Requirements
Using the Vega graphics on the Ryzen 3 2200G or Ryzen 5 2400G will require a fairly updated Linux graphics stack, which won't be found out-of-the-box on most Linux distributions at this time:
- The Linux 4.15 kernel is an absolute minimum requirement if using the open-source driver stack due to needing AMDGPU DC for Raven Ridge, which was only mainlined for this newly-released kernel. Linux 4.15 is a must but with Linux 4.16 are a number of Raven Ridge fixes. Linux 4.16 will be released as stable in April if you are not comfortable using kernel Git snapshots. I'll have comparison tests of both kernels and DRM-Next as time allows.
- Linux-Firmware.Git from around December or newer for having the necessary Raven Ridge files. Ubuntu releases, for example, don't yet have these needed firmware binary blobs, so you may need to clone that Git repository and update your /lib/firmware as without these microcode files you will not have working driver support.
- Mesa 18.0 or newer is definitely recommended for best feature support and performance. You may have luck using later Mesa 17.x releases, but RadeonSI and RADV have both received a lot of feature work and optimizations for Vega in recent months that using Mesa 18.0 is worthwhile if not Mesa 18.1-dev Git.
- The Mesa build should be at least against the LLVM 5.0 AMDGPU back-end but ideally LLVM 6.0 or 7.0 SVN for the best Vega support.
With those key components in place, you should be in good shape for Vega graphics support on these Raven chips, assuming you don't run into any corner-case bugs or issues. Unfortunately, on one of my Ubuntu 17.10 installations even with those updated components, the display failed to properly work when trying both Linux 4.15.2 and Linux 4.16-rc1.
On some boots the display would appear like so and without the ability to remotely SSH in:
While the rest of the time the display would be dark but I could at least SSH in. When doing so, there was indications of a hung GPU and indicating that Raven Ridge GPU recovery isn't currently supported.
Strangely though on another NVMe SSD in the same system, booting into that install with effectively the same components, the graphics were working without fault... I should learn more about this over the next day when trying with the Ryzen 3 2200G and having more time to experiment. But at least for the one installation, there was reproducible display/mode-setting issues with Linux 4.15+ and linux-firmware.git files. This happened with both DisplayPort and HDMI connections to a 4K display. These problems are a bit similar to other display issues that have been reported by at least one other early Raven Ridge tester at Golem.
There should also be out an updated AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver soon for those preferring that easier to deploy driver stack albeit it's only generally supported on the enterprise Linux distributions like Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Obviously as the benchmarks continue and I have more time with these chips, I'll update if I uncover any more serious issues during testing in the days ahead.
Now let's have a look at the performance....