The Latest Linux 5.2 + Mesa 19.2 Radeon Performance Against NVIDIA With Mid-Range GPUs

With the Linux 5.2 kernel a few weeks out from its stable release and now being in the middle of the Mesa 19.2 development cycle for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers, here are some fresh results looking at the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver. In this article the focus is on the mid-range (Polaris) line-up against the NVIDIA competition while similar tests on the high-end are currently being carried out.

These mid-range Linux GPU gaming benchmarks are intended to provide some fresh figures with the current open-source RadeonSI/RADV performance compared to NVIDIA. Beyond the upcoming high-end tests, next month of course is the Radeon RX 5700 series launch where we'll be providing launch-day Linux benchmarks. The mid-range cards tested for today's comparison included the Radeon RX 560, RX 570, RX 580, and RX 590. On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1650, GTX 1660, and GTX 1660 Ti.

With these latest Linux graphics benchmarks with the newest drivers, there are also performance-per-Watt metrics as well as performance-per-dollar based upon current pricing. All of this benchmarking was facilitated in a fully-automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite open-source testing software. Given this straight-forward comparison, let's jump right to these fresh results.