Radeon GPUs Are Increasingly Competing With NVIDIA GPUs On Latest RadeonSI/RADV Drivers

As it's been a few weeks since last delivering a modest Linux GPU comparison and given the continuously evolving state of the Linux kernel Git tree as well as the Mesa project that houses the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, here are our latest benchmarks showing the current state of the AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance relative to NVIDIA's long-standing and high-performance but proprietary driver using several different graphics cards.

The NVIDIA 390.42 driver was used on the green side as the current latest Linux graphics driver from the company. The tested GeForce graphics cards included the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti.

On the AMD side was the AMDGPU DRM-Next code for what will be introduced with the Linux 4.17 kernel cycle. On the Mesa side was 18.1-devel from Git this week and built against the LLVM 7.0 SVN AMDGPU back-end as found via the Padoka PPA for Ubuntu users. The tested AMD graphics cards were the Radeon RX 560, RX 580, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

All of these graphics cards were tested on the same Intel Core i7 8700K Coffee Lake system running Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 albeit with the graphics driver upgrades as mentioned.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were carried out for seeing how this very latest Radeon driver code competes with the NVIDIA Linux stack.