Catalyst 14.4 Has Advantages Over Linux 3.15 + Mesa 10.3 Git

While the Catalyst vs. R600 Gallium3D performance was once close, there's still big differences in some games and other OpenGL applications. Additionally, the Catalyst driver has received a bit more attention from AMD engineers in recent months with the continued push for better Linux gaming performance and support as a result of Valve and other new game studios embracing Linux. With the open-source Radeon driver they are still focusing upon performance but there's also been regressions and other issues recently occupying the developers.

The Radeon HD 6950 graphics card and other Cayman-based GPUs on the open-source driver continue to not run nearly as nice as other Radeon HD 6000 Northern Islands hardware. The Radeon HD 6950 performance being slower than the Radeon HD 6870 is something we have seen for months/years now out of the open-source driver stack. The Radeon HD 6870 meanwhile runs very well on the open-source driver and is at almost 80% the speed of Catalyst 14.4 on Ubuntu 14.04 for OpenArena.