Raven Ridge APUs to receive performance gains in Mesa 18.2 drivers for Linux

Linux distros are notoriously finicky when it comes to Radeon GPUs (good luck getting APU-based 3D acceleration to work properly on Ubuntu), but AMD fans may have something to celebrate. A number of commits on the Raven Ridge Linux driver stack has revealed that the Mesa-based RADV Vulkan drivers are going to get a performance boost.

Of course, this applies only to Zen+Vega based Radeon APUs, but its good news nonetheless for the Radeon-using Linux community. The commits entail that binning and DFSM (Deterministic Finite State Machine) have been enabled by default for Raven Ridge hardware, which has increased performance up to 3% for some demos and games (every frame counts!).

These features were exposed in RadeonSI for the OpenGL driver with Vega/GFX9 drivers

Last year is when these features became exposed in RadeonSI for the OpenGL driver with Vega/GFX9 hardware, so being ported over to RADV Vulkan drivers is good progress, considering the rocky footing AMD APUs had earlier this year.

If you’re a Raven Ridge hardware user, you can expect these improvements to be released in the upcoming Mesa 18.2 update – which was in fact already pushed back by two weeks, so we’re looking at an August release, as reported by release manager Andres Gomez in a Mesa-dev list update:

“Here is the tentative release plan for 18.2.0.

 Although the initial plan was to have the first release candidate by the end of this week, a slip of mind in my side on sending this plan is shifting the current schedule at mesa3d.org. We’ll update the release schedule there soon.

•   Aug 01 2018 – Feature freeze/Release candidate 1
•  Aug 08 2018 – Release candidate 2
•  Aug 15 2018 – Release candidate 3
•  Aug 22 2018 – Release candidate 4/final release

 This gives us approximately two weeks until the branch point.

 Note: In the spririt of keeping things clearer and more transparent, we will be keeping track of any features planned for the release in Bugzilla [1].”

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