Last week AMD released an updated AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver with performance fixes so I've now carried out a fresh comparison of this updated 17.10-429170 driver compared to the latest open-source stack of Mesa 17.2-dev Git plus the Linux 4.12 development kernel.

Tests for this article were done with the AMDGPU-PRO 17.10-429170 hybrid driver and Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev. With this new driver claiming performance fixes, I was curious to see how it runs up against the older 17.10 driver releases. Unfortunately, I didn't have any of those older binaries archived and AMD seems to have dropped their archived drivers from the site. So for this Monday comparison is just the latest hybrid driver OpenGL and Vulkan to the latest open-source AMDGPU + RadeonSI / RADV.

The graphics cards used for this comparison were the Radeon RX 580 and Radeon R9 Fury.

JavaScript is required to view these results or log-in to Phoronix Premium.

The AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver was tested on Ubuntu 16.10 since the hybrid driver doesn't yet support Ubuntu 17.04 / newer Linux kernel / X.Org Server releases. But the Padoka PPA no longer ships the latest drivers for 16.10 and when building Mesa Git on Ubuntu 16.10, I ended up hitting Unity/GLAMOR issues. So for the open-source tests I did that from Ubuntu 17.04. Everything else remained the same during the testing process.

A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.