AMD Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 Deliver Great Open-Source Linux Performance At Launch

Just a few years ago it wasn't imaginable to think of running a professional graphics product on fully open-source and upstream drivers on launch day, but here it is... Not only is the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 both working atop the upstream open-source driver stack, but the performance is comparable to that of the packaged Radeon Software for Linux enterprise driver. Years ago when they still relied on the proprietary OpenGL driver for workstation use-cases and the PRO Vulkan driver was more of an advantage, but the proprietary OpenGL driver is now largely a remnant of the past.

Even for workstation workloads with SPECViewPerf 2020, the upstream RadeonSI driver performance is great and competes with the packaged driver. In some cases there were cases where the packaged driver performed slightly better either due to regressions or optimizations not yet being upstreamed, but for the most part the SPECViewPerf 2020 performance was very comparable between upstream and the packaged driver state for enterprise Linux distributions.

With it being about a decade since last being seeded with any Radeon PRO (FirePro) graphics products for review, it's phenomenal to see how well these new GPUs were performing on Linux and able to run on fully upstream open-source driver support at launch.