AMD Raven Ridge Graphics On Linux vs. Lower-End NVIDIA / AMD GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 16 February 2018 at 09:30 AM EST. Page 1 of 6. 42 Comments.

This week we have delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the OpenGL/Vulkan graphics capabilities of AMD's new Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 3 2200G an the Vega 11 on Ryzen 5 2400G. Those tests have included comparisons to the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel processors as well as older AMD Kaveri APUs. For those interested in seeing how the Raven Ridge Vega graphics compare to lower-end Radeon and GeForce discrete graphics cards, here are those first Linux benchmarks.

In this article are fresh benchmark results of the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G graphics on Linux with a more diverse range of graphics/gaming benchmarks compared to the initial articles now that more time has passed and also doing away with the Intel/Kaveri data points that limited the gaming potential for comparison. Additionally, these tests were done from Linux 4.16-rc1 with a newer Mesa 18.1-dev + LLVM 7.0 SVN snapshot from the Padoka PPA. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was used for this round of testing.

As noted in the earlier Raven Ridge articles, there are still some issues persisting with these APUs on Linux, particularly around the display support. Even with Linux 4.16, on some boots the system would hang: a black display and no ability to SSH into the system. This seemed most commonly when rebooting the system but tended to have a better success rate from a cold boot. Those display issues are still happening and there are also some hangs in a few of the Vulkan/OpenGL games as noted in the past articles this week. But as the Raven Ridge Vega 8/11 Linux support progresses, you can expect to read about it on Phoronix and fresh benchmark results.

For the Radeon dGPU testing in this article done when using the Ryzen 5 2400G, the Radeon RX 460, RX 550, and RX 560 were included as the available lower-end cards I had available at the time for testing. I also tossed in the Radeon RX 580 as a more gamer-oriented and capable graphics card for most of today's Linux games. All these Radeon tests were done off the same software stack.

On the NVIDIA side was the 390.25 driver when using the Linux 4.15 stable kernel. The GeForce cards tested with the Ryzen 5 2400G included the GeForce GTX 750, GTX 950, GTX 1050, and also the GTX 1060 for comparing to the RX 580 on this lower-end system and for seeing if the Raven APUs are the bottleneck with any of the RX 580 / GTX 1060 testing for Linux gamers.

Raven Ridge vs. Radeon dGPU vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison

The same Ubuntu Linux installation was used throughout all of this testing as with the same system and also enforcing the performance CPU frequency scaling governor during all tests. As with the other Raven tests this week, the Vega graphics had 2GB of system memory access configured from the BIOS. The Phoronix Test Suite was used for facilitating all of this benchmarking.


Related Articles