How AMD's Open-Source GPU Driver Performance Evolved In 2015: Big Wins

Under the open-source Tesseract game, the HD 6870 performance was relatively unchanged while the HD 6950 and R7 370 saw noticeable improvements in performance for 2015.

More performance improvements for the open-source driver in 2015, this time with Team Fortress 2. The HD 6870 was unstable with the 2015 configuration for TF2.

Lastly, the Xonotic first person shooter showed off very nice improvements with the Linux kernel and Mesa upgrades over 2015. The HD 6950 was 32% faster compared to last year and the R7 370 was 35% faster.

Again, besides greater performance, the open-source Radeon Linux drivers in 2015 gained OpenGL 4.1 support (though only select GL 4.1 support on the R600g driver), Tonga support finally through AMDGPU, video acceleration improvements, and much more. The feature look at open-source GPU driver progress will be dedicated to another article.

While the performance was boosted a lot this year, the open-source driver performance for the most part continues to lag behind the proprietary AMD Linux driver, as shown by the comparison done a few days ago.

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