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Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 16 March 2020.

Here is an up-to-date look at how the very latest Mesa 20.1 Git performance is for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver both out-of-the-box and when enabling the Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end alternative to AMDGPU LLVM. Plus there are benchmarks of the latest AMDVLK open-source AMD Vulkan driver and also when using AMDGPU-PRO's Vulkan packages that still rely upon AMD's proprietary shader compiler.

The tested driver configurations for this latest AMD Radeon Linux gaming comparison were:

- Mesa 20.1-devel RADV from the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu Linux.

- The same Mesa 20.1-devel RADV build but enabling the ACO back-end via RADV_PERFTEST=aco.

- AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver released last week.

- AMDGPU-PRO 19.50 using just its Vulkan driver packages.

These four drivers were in turn tested on four graphics cards:

- Radeon RX 5700 XT (Navi)

- Radeon RX 5600 XT (Navi)

- Radeon RX Vega 56 (Vega)

- Radeon RX 590 (Polaris)

All of the tests were done on the same AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system running Ubuntu 19.10 paired with a Linux 5.6 kernel snapshot throughout for offering a bleeding-edge AMDGPU kernel driver.

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Via the Phoronix Test Suite a range of Vulkan-based Linux games were tested.