One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMDVLK formerly delivered better performance than RADV was with Vulkan ray-tracing. But RADV ray-tracing improved a lot in 2025 as shown in recent benchmarks. So for this Christmas 2025 benchmarking is a final look at how RADV is going up against the now-defunct AMDVLK driver.
AMD stopped AMDVLK development in May in favor of focusing exclusively on RADV moving forward for Vulkan Linux needs. For this end-of-year benchmarking is a last look at the AMDVLK driver performance compared to the latest Mesa RADV driver state — including for Vulkan ray-tracing which was the last stronghold for the AMDVLK driver.
Using the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards as the last to be supported by AMDVLK, I ran benchmarks of the AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 final release against RADV as of Mesa 26.0-devel as of 20 December via the Mesa ACO PPA for easy reproducibility. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D test system was running Ubuntu 25.10 with an upgrade to the Linux 6.18 kernel.
A variety of Vulkan graphics and compute benchmarks were then run for RADV and AMDVLK on these Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards for seeing how the performance compares.
