AMDGPU-PRO

AMDGPU-PRO is Article description::the next generation closed source graphics component that operates on top of the open source [[AMDGPU drivers for newer AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards.]]

Users whose main use for their graphics card is gaming and other general home-use graphical hardware acceleration should use the open source AMDGPU drivers instead, since the performance of the open source drivers can be as much 100% more compared to AMDGPU-PRO. However, the PRO driver provides a few features that Mesa still lacks, namely OpenGL compatibility profiles, OpenCL 2.0, and a fully conformant Vulkan implementation. Also, most of the games for which Mesa outperforms the closed-source driver run in Wine, rather than natively. Thus, the closed-source driver is mostly useful to users who want to play games (such as Civilization V) or use applications (such as UCSF Chimera) that rely on compatibility profiles, or want to run anything that uses Vulkan with advanced shaders, or want to fully exploit OpenCL.

AMDGPU-PRO is currently not distributed within Gentoo's default package manager.

External resources

 * A list of AMDGPU-PRO articles at Phoronix.com
 * A step-by-step guide to install and run the propietary AMDGPU-PRO driver on Gentoo, with ebuilds and patches.