RADV vs. AMDVLK Driver Performance For Strix Halo Radeon 8060S Graphics
This large round of RADV vs. AMDVLK driver testing on AMD Strix Halo using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 / Radeon 8060S Graphics proved very refreshing with how far RADV performance has evolved over the past several years. In the majority of the benchmarks the Mesa RADV driver was faster than AMDVLK. Even with the default RADV driver of Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, the performance typically was superior to the latest AMDVLK release. Most exciting was seeing the competitive Vulkan ray-tracing performance between AMDVLK and RADV with that being one of the main areas where AMDVLK typically delivered the better performance.
There were still some select games where AMDVLK had a minor performance advantage as well as in some of the Vulkan compute tests, but overall RADV was outperforming the AMDVLK driver. For the areas where RADV lost, hopefully the Mesa developers will get around to looking at those differences.
When taking the geometric mean across all of the 100+ Vulkan benchmarks carried out, the Mesa RADV driver was around 10% faster than the current AMDVLK driver. A very nice showing for the Mesa driver stack for those considering the very exciting and powerful AMD Strix Halo integrated graphics. The results perhaps not too surprising though given the recent announcement from AMD that even the Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver stack will be migrating to the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan components.
Thanks to HP for having supplied the ZBook Ultra G1a with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 for making this continued round of Linux performance testing possible.
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