Slackware64-Current (15.0): mini-ITX Benchmarks Part 3

I have finally had some time to compile the benchmarks for a series of GPUs on the new mini-ITX build. The purpose was to see if the amdgpu driver is ready to compete with Nvidia on a Linux powered game box. The GPUs choices are simply what I had available and fairly recent, except for the RX 5700 XT, which was a new purchase.

System Configuration

Software
Slackware development is proceeding at a brisk pace: kernel is 5.4.22 as of this writing, along with numerous updates. Since I have since sold the GTX 1060, I will not repeat the benchmarks. These results still give a good snapshot into the state of amdgpu and Slackware.

The GPU Contenders

Benchmarks

Results
All benchmark were run at default PTS settings and default GPU clocks. For the GTX 1060, I added runs comparing the nouveau driver. Some of the benchmarks did not complete using the nouveau driver. Although nouveau is fine for general desktop use, for gaming and other heavy 3D tasks, amdgpu or Nvidia is required. At this stage, it looks like amdgpu can keep up with the Nvidia proprietary drivers quite well. The RX 590 is the same general generation as the GTX 1060 and is on par with the nvidia driver on the Unigine benchmarks. The RX 590 outperforms the GTX 1060 by a good margin on STK. There were some anomalously high frame rate on some of the STK 4K maps.  These may be due to the skipping of some texture or other feature at that resolution.

The monstrous XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC Ultra (so THICC...barely fits in my full tower case) is aggressively factory clocked and aimed to compete with the GTX 2060/2070 generation cards. The tests were run with the dual BIOS switch set to quiet mode. This keeps the 3 fans off until the temperature exceeds 60° C. I haven’t tried the OC switch position yet. The RX 5700 XT is marketed as a 1440p card; I decided to push it hard on 4K on the Unigine benchmarks with amdgpu driver. It generally outperforms the GTX 1060 and GTX 1080.

The Unigine Superposition benchmark is a heavy stress test of the PC and GPU. Here the amdgpu driver perform quite well against Nvidia. The PC as well as all cards struggled at 4K ultra mode setting (<8 fps), with the RX 5700 XT taking the lead at 8 fps.  At more reasonable 4K settings, the results where fun to watch on screen, and showed the potential of the amdgpu driver.

The RX 5700 XT performs quite well at 4K with the following Steam games I’ve tried so far:

These last 2 use vulkan and I set RADV_PERFTEST=aco to use Valve’s higher performing ACO shader compiler [EDIT: No longer needed; ACO is now enabled by default].  These games were run on my i7-6850K 32GB tower PC, with Freesync and tearfree turned on.

Conclusion
The Mesa and amdgpu drivers currently don’t just show promise, but are now ready for immersive 3D games.  If you are tired of fighting with Nvidia installations, or just the outrageous expense, give AMD Radeon a try.

As always: YMMV!

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pat Volkerding for Slackware, and to numerous contributors to Slackware, and to the Slackware community. Thanks also to ttks (freenode ##slackware-help) for his generous financial contribution.