The latest in our ongoing testing of AMD Strix Halo performance using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is analyzing the Vulkan API performance between Mesa’s RADV driver and the AMDVLK official open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems. More than one hundred benchmarks were run looking at the performance from Steam Play games to Vulkan compute workloads.
RADV is the Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa that in turn is what’s shipped by default by nearly all major desktop Linux distributions. RADV has long been the preferred option by Linux gamers and what Valve invests into working on with their open-source software efforts and used by the Steam Deck / SteamOS. RADV is great for Linux gaming while traditionally has been behind AMDVLK when it comes to Vulkan ray-tracing and other select areas.
AMDVLK meanwhile is the “official” AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems and derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources. AMDVLK is what traditionally has been distributed as part of AMD’s packaged Radeon Software for Linux driver and seemingly more focused on workstation/enterprise use-cases than gamers. But as noted one month ago, Radeon Software for Linux is dropping AMD’s proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. Moving forward AMD will be using the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers rather than AMDVLK and their classic OpenGL driver.
Presumably this change to Radeon Software for Linux will lead to AMD ceasing feature work on the AMDVLK open-source driver. That though hasn’t been publicly/officially confirmed yet. It perhaps already happened with there not being any new AMDVLK release since 30 April with the AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 driver release so nearly two months without any new update.
In any event with AMDVLK having added Strix Halo support back in February with the AMDVLK 2025.Q1.2 release, I was curious to see how its performance compares to Mesa RADV. ALl of the Strix Halo Vulkan testing on Phoronix these past two months had been under the Mesa RADV driver.
For this round of benchmarking with the HP ZBook Ultra G1a featuring the top-end AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 SoC with Radeon 8060S Graphics I was using Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS. The following configurations tested for this Vulkan driver comparison included:
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS – Mesa 24.2 – The default Mesa driver stack shipped currently by this Ubuntu Long Term Support release.
Mesa 25.1.4 – Upgrading to the current stable RADV Mesa release from the Kisak Mesa PPA for the current RADV driver capabilities.
AMDVLK 2025.Q2.1 – The current AMDVLK release.
The same Linux kernel and other components were used during this Vulkan driver benchmarking with just changing out the Mesa/AMDVLK Vulkan driver used for this Radoen 8060S Graphics / Strix Halo testing on Linux.
