One year and 4 months have already passed since AMD released the Radeon RX 480. Our testing results and those from other reputable online publications have already shown its impressive value for playing games at 1080p using a monitor with variable refresh rate. Affordable FreeSync monitors such as LG 23MP68VQ and AOC Agon G2460PF give Radeon RX 480 an advantage over the GeForce GTX 1060. There is also Vulkan that enabled Radeon RX 480 to surpass GeForce GTX 1060 in Doom . However, almost all of the information about the Radeon RX 480 available on well-known online publications are based on the performance using AMD’s Crimson driver. Majority of PC gamers are probably not aware that RX 480 and other Radeon GPU’s can run games without installing GPU drivers made by AMD.
Mesa is an open-source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan . Game developers, hardware vendors, and community of programmers contribute to the development of Mesa. We learned of its use in gaming from Phoronix and have found their gaming results interesting. Here at Back2Gaming, we don’t just read about stuff, we actually do them if resources are available. So, read on to find out how Radeon RX 480 performs even without AMD’s proprietary driver.
How We Tested
We tested games with built-in benchmark tools to measure performance. To make the test results relevant for gamers using mainstream GPU’s, the games we tested are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, HITMAN, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Serious Sam 3: BFE (Fusion 2017). Here is the test system we used and everything is running at stock speed.
Processor – Intel Core i7 7700 3.6 – 4.2 GHz
Graphics Card – ASUS ROG Strix RX 480 8GB
Motherboard – Gigabyte Z170N-Gaming 5 (rev 1.1)
Memory – G. Skill Trident Z 8GBx2 DDR4 3200 @ 2,133 MHz
Operating System – Ubuntu MATE 17.10
GPU Driver – Mesa 17.2.2
OS Drive – OCZ Trion 150 240GB
Secondary Drive – Apacer AS510S 256GB
Monitor – LG 29UM58 (2560 x 1080, 60 Hz, IPS)
As usual, the test results are the average of 3 benchmark runs. There are 4 benchmark runs but the 1st one is used to heat up the GPU and is not included in the averaging.
Test Results
The built-in benchmark tool of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III depicts real-world game play so the performance numbers you see in the graph will probably be the same with what you will get when playing the game. RX 480 delivers an impressive performance here even when running only in OpenGL mode.
Closing Thoughts
The development of Mesa started in August 1993 and it’s really good to see how far it has progressed. Playing the latest games used to be tied to having to install a driver from the GPU vendor. Now, gamers have a choice and playing PC games on Linux is not limited anymore to using NVIDIA GeForce GPU’s. Though we have seen impressive results in our testing, using Mesa for Radeon GPU’s still has a long way to go. Some games don’t support Mesa upon release and gamers have to wait for game patches or newer versions of Mesa.
We are still not done yet with testing RX 480 using Mesa. Vulkan game benchmarks using RX 480 will be published hopefully before this week ends.
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