While AMD may correct the situation after the launch of its RDNA3 graphics cards later this year, the Linux drivers offered by the firm are currently less efficient than the open-source Mesa RADV drivers. And, in this case, the performance gap is large enough to adopt them without remorse.
Do you have a recent AMD GPU and play on Linux? You should take a close look at the open-source Mesa RADV drivers…at least if you haven’t already. The latter are indeed more effective than the latest Vulkan Linux AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 drivers, deployed last week by AMD.
More performance through third-party drivers…
This is what we learn from Phoronix. The specialized site compared the performance obtained by the two drivers, under Linux, with an RDNA 2 graphics card. The configuration chosen was based on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, coupled with 35 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i9- 12900K. The set was powered by Ubuntu 22.04, while the comparisons were done through Mesa 22.0.1.
Without being abysmal, the gap is large enough to give RADV drivers a lead over a good part of the games tested (Hitman 3Batman Arkham Knight, DIRT Rally 2.0, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Strange Brigade, Total War: Warhammer III…). All the results obtained are accessible at this address.
In his article, Phoronix states, however, that no testing of Radeon Software for Linux’s proprietary Vulkan driver has been performed…because AMD has not yet released a driver with official support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “.
Who developed RADV?
As a reminder, RADV (for Radeon Vulkan graphics driver), is developed by a community of engineers from Google and Red Hat, but also other contributors who work for the Linux platform. It has established itself as the best choice for users of AMD graphics cards operating under Linux.
The Mesa project’s RADV driver is also present in all major Linux distribution channels, unlike the AMDVLK driver carried by AMD. This is an additional advantage for this solution, which remains for the moment more interesting than that of AMD, at least on current GPUs. It remains to be seen whether Lisa Su’s firm will be able to reverse the trend with future Linux drivers, expected with the launch of its next RDNA3 graphics cards.
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Source : WCCFTech
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