The Most Energy Efficient Radeon GPU For AMD Linux Gaming

With Unigine Tropics is where the Radeon R9 290 re-clocking broke and led to the disappointing performance results, as covered in the Phoronix articles this week that while Linux 3.17 brings proper AMD Hawaii open-source driver support, re-clocking seems to break from time to time. Also it seems that the Radeon R7 260X ran into a similar situation on the open-source driver where its speeds were utterly low. The R7 260X had re-clocking issues in the past but that was corrected by newer GPU microcode files, which were present on this system and the performance with Counter-Strike: Source was great, but something with Unigine was causing the R7 260X and R9 290 to go awry. Due to these issues, the fastest graphics cards for running this OpenGL tech demo were the Radeon R9 270X and HD 7950.

With the borked re-clocking, the Radeon R9 290 and R7 260X have very low power use...

The Radeon R9 270X comes out ahead as delivering the best performance-per-Watt for Unigine Tropics followed by the HD 7850/7950.

Aside from the hot, aging Radeon graphics cards, the HD 7950 was the warmest for Unigine Tropics among the GCN GPUs.