16-Way Graphics Card Comparison With Radeon On ROCm, NVIDIA With Initial 2018 Linux Drivers
While in some tests like MandelGPU, the RX Vega performance was coming in short of expectations. The R9 285 here failed to run the test.
LuxMark normally runs extremely well with the Radeon OpenCL driver, but with the Hotel scene it failed to run on some Radeon GPUs and for where it ran the performance came up short.
In the case of the microphone scene, the ROCm OpenCL driver would hang indefinitely on compiling the OpenCL kernels.
While in the Luxball HDR scene, the Radeon performance is back to where we tend to see it with this particular closed-source OpenCL test and was running very fast.
With FAHBench, the Folding@Home benchmark, ROCm also failed to run here. Not all NVIDIA results are here simply because I forgot to add this benchmark to the test queue originally and only added it after beginning with a few of the tested cards.
That's where things stand today with the NVIDIA vs. Radeon OpenCL performance on Linux. Sadly in 2018 we have yet to see NVIDIA deliver full OpenCL 2.0+ support in their drivers while ROCm is also still working in that direction. The NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal cards tested on the 390.12 driver all ran the OpenCL tests desired and did so at their expected performance. With ROCm 1.7.60, the performance is better than we have seen in some previous tests but there are still cases where some OpenCL kernels weren't running and in a few cases where the performance wasn't in line with expectations. It will be interesting to see what comes of the next ROCm release and fortunately the continued work towards getting all of their kernel driver changes upstreamed, hopefully in time for Linux 4.17, to make this open-source compute stack much easier to deploy across Linux distributions. But for now at least they moved to a DKMS process rather than distributing an entire kernel image.
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