Upgraded Kernel & Mesa Yield A Big Boost For Athlon R3 Graphics

With OpenArena the frame-rate went from just 8 FPS on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 19 FPS when using the Linux 3.14 kernel. Linux 3.14 allows for the R3 Graphics to re-clock to their highest performance state compared to Linux 3.13 where DPM isn't enabled by default for GCN GPUs. When going to Mesa 10.2-devel that will be officially released in about one month, the frame-rate rose to 25 FPS... That's over a three-fold performance improvement when pulling in the bleeding edge latest code.

The Unigine Sanctuary frame-rate nearly tripled when moving to the Linux 3.14 kernel, but no further improvement was found for this demanding OpenGL benchmark with Mesa 10.2-devel.

The Unvanquished game still yields poor performance on the open-source Radeon Linux driver with this low-end Athlon APU.