Ubuntu 18.10 Is A Nice Upgrade For Radeon Gamers, Especially For Steam VR
The Tesseract open-source game saw faster OpenGL performance in moving to Ubuntu 18.10 for both the RX 580 and RX Vega 64. In the case of the RX 580 Polaris, there was a small performance dip on the latest Git code.
Thrones of Britannia at medium settings didn't see much change...
When pushed with extreme settings, Thrones of Britannia on the Radeon GPUs with RADV Vulkan driver saw a healthy performance boost using the Git driver stack.
Unigine Superposition only saw minor improvements in performance this year with the already mature RadeonSI driver.
Lastly in the long-standing Xonotic open-source game, the RX 580 performance improved by a few frames with the newer Ubuntu Linux release while the RX Vega 64 performance regressed.
For Vulkan-powered games in particular with the Mesa RADV driver, Ubuntu 18.10 tended to offer some performance benefits in the various Linux game ports relying upon Vulkan. As outlined at the start, the big benefit to Ubuntu 18.10 for Radeon gamers is if using Steam VR with those underlying infrastructure improvements now in place to provide better VR head-mounted display support. Troubling from these results though were several performance regressions when using Linux 4.19 + Mesa 18.3-devel, so you may want to hold off on using those third-party packages for the time being.
More Ubuntu 18.10 benchmarks will be coming up shortly on Phoronix.
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