AMD RDNA 3.5 Graphics On 2025 Drivers: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 25.04 iGPU Performance
First up was the vkpeak benchmark for stressing the potential peak performance of the Vulkan API drivers: the official Radeon Vulkan driver on Windows and the Mesa RADV driver on Linux. It was an interesting mix here of whether Windows or Linux was faster. The RDNA 3.5 Vulkan performance on Windows was better in some of the operations but RADV managed to outperform the official Windows drivers at FP32 scalar, FP16 scalar, FP64, and other select areas.
One area that wasn't too surprising where Windows maintained faster performance was for Vulkan ray-tracing. With Quake II RTX native to each platform, the RDNA 3.5 ray-tracing performance was consistently better on Windows 11 with the official AMD driver. The Mesa RADV driver has continued making improvements for the Vulkan RT performance but still isn't matching that of the official AMD driver code.