The OpenGL Speed & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series Through The R9 Fury

While the open-source AMD Linux driver stack supports all Radeon hardware and doesn't strip out older generations of support from the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, that doesn't mean things always work. You can still find support for ATI R300 GPUs and older on Linux, but given that AMD's open-source developers and other upstream programmers are more focused on newer graphics card support, regressions do happen. With the graphics card I tried on this latest Linux driver stack, the following problems were present:

For the original "R600" graphics card, the Radeon HD 2900XT, it doesn't play nicely with the latest Linux kernel. When trying to start the X.Org Server at boot, there was just a constant stream of "ring 0 stalls" and thus was not able to take the testing any further for this graphics card due to the show-stopping problem.

When trying to boot with the Radeon HD 4550, the graphics card would stop supplying the monitor a signal. There wasn't anything evident from the logs when remotely connecting, but mode-setting was borked for the HD 4550 and would only boot with "nomodeset", which makes for an unaccelerated experience. The other Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards were working nicely. Left out from the testing was the Radeon HD 4870 X2, since there still isn't any Linux CrossFire support by the open-source driver.

On the professional side, the FireGL V8600 was no longer mode-setting nicely on the Linux kernel used.

The Radeon HD 5000/6000 series support was great with the cards tested. When it came to the Radeon HD 7950, it would no longer send a monitor signal after the OpenGL tests began to run. The Radeon R9 270X was in a similar boat but even worse with its display going away a few seconds after hitting Ubuntu's Unity desktop.

Aside from that, the other tests could at least run all of the tests. However, as the results show, the Radeon R9 Fury open-source experience was still far from ideal.

The graphics cards that could be tested based upon not running into show-stopping problems and GPUs I had available were the Radeon HD 3650, HD 3850, HD 4670, HD 4770, HD 4850, HD 4870, HD 6570, HD 6770, HD 6870, and HD 6950. From the GCN era the working cards that were tested included the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, R7 370, and R9 Fury. Again, limited by the cards I had available.