2014 Catalyst Linux Graphics Benchmarks Year-In-Review

Lastly are some OpenCL compute tests using LuxMark on our Ubuntu Linux box.

There were some minor improvements for the R9 290 and R9 270X in the OpenCL compute benchmarks but nothing too significant.

If you're an owner of a Radeon R9 290 Hawaii graphics card, this year of Catalyst driver updates was great with many OpenGL benchmarks showing ~20% faster performance with improvements made to Catalyst 14.9 and 14.12. However, users of older (non-Hawaii) graphics cards didn't seem to encounter much in the way of performance changes with this year's infrequent Catalyst Linux releases.

While the performance may not have gone up for these other Radeon GPUs this year, at least new features were added and many bugs fixed.

During this year the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack advanced a great deal too. Coming up in a later article this month will be a similar open-source Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D comparison using the graphics code from the end of last year to the end of this year. Equivalent tests of Intel and NVIDIA hardware under Linux is being done too. Again, if you appreciate all of this testing being carried out single-handedly over the holidays, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip.