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

With the vkpeak benchmarks for measuring Vulkan peak compute performance, the Mesa RADV driver performance was often comparable to the PRO Vulkan driver. In some cases though the PRO driver proved faster while in other cases the RADV driver led.

From the mix of OpenGL/Vulkan graphics and Vulkan compute tests carried out in time for launch day, overall the upstream open-source driver stack proved very comparable to the packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver that is comprised of a back-port of the AMDGPU DKMS kernel driver code paired with Mesa OpenGL/video components and then the PRO Vulkan driver. This was phenomenal to see and something that's only happened in the past couple of years for having great open-source workstation graphics performance -- RadeonSI now dominates across the Radeon spectrum compared to workstation previously having been a key focus to their proprietary OpenGL driver. And all of this working at-launch with the latest Linux kernel and Mesa (as well as stable versions) was a pure delight.

Those are the benchmarks I was able to conduct in time for today's launch while follow-up articles will look at the OpenCL compute performance, comparison to old FirePro hardware still in the lab, and other interesting tests looking at the AMD open-source Linux driver support and performance. Thanks to AMD for providing these AMD Radeon PRO review samples for testing.