AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux

The results in this article showed that when using the AMD Catalyst driver the performance was largely the same. It isn't much of a surprise at all given AMD's shared Catalyst driver code-base provides a near performance and feature parity in general, and it's good to see enough initial Linux testing went on to ensure this was the case for the Kaveri APUs at launch. In some of the tests though the frame-rate results were leaning slightly in favor of the Catalyst driver on Microsoft Windows 8.1. The similar OpenGL graphics/gaming performance is also something encountered with NVIDIA's Linux vs. Windows performance (for SteamOS too), but it's a completely different story when it comes to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but Intel is quickly improving and AMD's open-source Gallium3D driver is making progress almost daily.

As mentioned in the earlier AMD Kaveri article on Phoronix -- AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: The Linux Introduction -- testing from the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux graphics driver wasn't possible at this time but I hope to share those results in the near future with a working open-source GPU driver stack.

Besides giving some initial cross-platform graphics performance figures for the AMD A10-7850K, hopefully these results were useful if you're familiar with these same benchmarks on your own system. If you are not, and are familiar with running the Phoronix Test Suite, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1401122-PL-AMDKAVERI23 from the command-line to see how your own system performs; it will automatically install all of the same tests, configure them in the same manner, execute the tests, and then render all the results side-by-side in a fully automated and reproducible manner.

Overall, the AMD Kaveri A10-7850K APU is off to an interesting start and stay tuned for the rest of the open-source Linux performance benchmark data in the coming days -- performance-per-Watt data, OpenCL performance, and plenty of AMD Linux graphics testing.