Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Performance For The AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series
With the demanding GravityMark benchmark, the performance was very close between the AMDVLK and RADV drivers on both the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT for conventional Vulkan rendering. But when engaging the Vulkan ray-tracing capabilities was again a story of AMDVLK dominating compared to the current Mesa 25 state of RADV.
Overall across all of the graphics benchmarks carried out, the average power consumption was roughly similar between the RADV and AMDVLK drivers while using the Linux 6.14 kernel. But the minimum GPU power use did appear higher when using AMDVLK compared to RADV for both of these tested graphics cards.
For the majority of the tests the Mesa RADV and AMDVLK drivers were delivering very healthy competition between these open-source Radeon Vulkan driver options. The one area where AMDVLK does remain ahead of RADV though is for Vulkan ray-tracing with AMD's official Vulkan API driver having a considerable advantage still in the Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks conducted. Outside of the Vulkan RT tests, it was great seeing the upstream Mesa RADV driver performing so well at-launch for the RDNA4 graphics cards compared to the official AMDVLK driver.
If you enjoyed this article consider joining Phoronix Premium to view this site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal or Stripe tips are also graciously accepted. Thanks for your support.