One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs. Given all the interest recently around Strix Halo and the Framework Desktop as well, today’s benchmarking is looking at the performance between these different OpenCL driver implementations for the Radeon 8060S Graphics.
Rusticl is able to advertise OpenCL 3.0 support on modern AMD Radeon GPUs with the recent state of the Mesa code. AMD’s official OpenCL driver stack with ROCm meanwhile advertises OpenCL 2.1. In being curious though how performant Rusticl is considering its a “generic” OpenCL driver across Gallium3D hardware drivers, I wanted to see how well it could compete with AMD’s official OpenCL driver solution for Linux systems.
Using the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” with Radeon 8060S graphics, I ran benchmarks using Rusticl as found with Mesa 25.3-devel Git and then repeating the same OpenCL tests while using ROCm 6.4.2 for the latest official OpenCL driver implementation for AMD graphics processors. The same Linux 6.16.1 kernel build was used for all of the testing in just swapping out the user-space OpenCL driver implementations.
Besides this Strix Halo testing, I’ll also be running similar Rusticl tests soon on Intel graphics compared to the official Intel Compute Runtime and other hardware drivers with Rusticl continuing to mature for a pleasant open-source and upstream OpenCL experience from Mesa.
