RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Drivers Continue Stiff Performance Battle

With the RADV Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver continuing to be advanced by Valve and other independent developers while AMD continues with open-source code drops of their official AMDVLK Vulkan driver, it's been a friendly open-source Radeon Vulkan driver performance and feature/extension battle since that official AMD Vulkan driver was opened up at the end of last year. With new AMDVLK/XGL/PAL code drops happening about weekly and RADV continuing to receive new feature/performance work every few days, both drivers continue maturing gracefully as shown by our latest performance benchmarks.

For your viewing pleasure today is a fresh look at the AMDVLK versus RADV Vulkan driver performance when testing each of these AMD Vulkan Linux drivers with a Radeon RX 580 Polaris and RX Vega 64 graphics cards. The AMDVLK driver was built from Git master source on 17 April. The RADV driver was obtained from Mesa 18.1-dev built against LLVM 7.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA on 16 April.

The same Core i7 8700K system running Ubuntu 17.10 was used throughout the benchmarking process with the only change being the swapping of the Vulkan driver. All of these Vulkan benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite with testing Dota 2, Dawn of War 3, F1 2017, Mad Max, and Serious Sam 3 BFE.