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Rewritten OpenGL drivers make AMD’s GPUs “up to 72%” faster in some pro apps

    Rewritten OpenGL drivers make AMD's GPUs

    AMD

    Most graphics driver development efforts today, whether you’re talking about Nvidia, Intel, or AMD, are focused on new APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, increasingly sophisticated scaling technologies, and specific enhancements for new game releases. But this year, AMD has also focused on an old problem area for its graphics drivers: OpenGL performance.

    Over the summer, AMD released a rewritten OpenGL driver that it said would improve the performance of Minecraft up to 79 percent (independent testing also found gains in other OpenGL games and benchmarks, though not always to the same extent). Now those same optimizations are coming to AMD’s officially validated GPU drivers for its Radeon Pro series workstation cards, giving a big boost to professional apps like Solidworks and Autodesk Maya.

    “The AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q3 driver has been tested and approved by Dell, HP and Lenovo for stability and is available through their driver downloads,” the company wrote in its blog post. “AMD continues to work with software developers to certify the latest drivers.”

    AMD says the OpenGL driver rewrite in its 22.Q3 professional GPU drivers will bring major benefits to professional apps that rely on the older graphics API.
    enlarge / AMD says the OpenGL driver rewrite in its 22.Q3 professional GPU drivers will bring major benefits to professional apps that rely on the older graphics API.

    AMD

    Using a Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPU, AMD says the new drivers can improve Solidworks’ rendering speeds by 52 or 28 percent at 4K and 1080p resolutions, respectively. Autodesk Maya performance increases by 34 percent at 4K or 72 percent at native resolution. The magnitude of the improvements varies based on the app and GPU, but AMD’s testing shows significant, consistent improvements across the board on the Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and W6400 GPUs, improvements AMD believes will help those GPUs run analog. Nvidia workstation GPUs like the RTX A5000 and A2000 and the Nvidia T600.

    A full list of compatible Radeon Pro Series GPUs is available in the 22.Q3 driver release notes; In addition to desktop cards, the driver is also compatible with the mobile GPUs in various laptops from Dell, HP, Lenovo and Panasonic. AMD has not shown performance figures for Radeon Pro GPUs older than the 6000 series, although presumably all GPUs supported by the new drivers will see at least some benefit.

    The OpenGL API is old, but it is still relatively widely used among older games (the PC version of Minecraft is a prominent example), in professional apps, and as a rendering backend for game console emulators, among others. AMD also rewrote its DirectX 11 drivers earlier this year, although the performance gains in most games were generally much smaller than the improvements offered by the new OpenGL drivers.