The Most Energy Efficient Radeon GPU For AMD Linux Gaming

Here's a look at the thermal and system power consumption data overall for the three OpenGL tests used in this article:

The old RV770 GPUs (HD 4850/4870) were the hottest followed by the passively-cooled HD 5450. Of the modern GCN GPUs, the Radeon HD 7950 tested was certainly the warmest. As a reminder though, the Radeon R7 260X and Radeon R9 290 ran into re-clocking issues that allowed those GPUs to run cooler than normal in the last two tests with their performance just being in line for Counter-Strike: Source. The Radeon R9 270X graphics card had three fans so its operating temperature was very good.

To reiterate, the Radeon R9 290 and R7 260X are under represented due to their broken re-clocking during Unigine.

From these tests today, the Radeon R9 270X graphics card overall seemed to be delivering the best, energy efficient performance on the open-source AMD Linux driver. The R9 270X uses the Curacao XT, which is a re-badged Pitcairn and the performance a step above a HD 7870. The temperatures on this R9 270X were also very good due to this Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X having three fans.

Also coming in close around the R9 270X was the Radeon HD 7950 graphics card, which too works great now on the latest open-source driver. These recent results certainly show that with the newest Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code that the RadeonSI driver for HD 7000 series and newer is on par with the R600 Gallium3D driver that provided support for the pre-GCN graphics processors.

Using a Radeon R9 290 with the open-source driver would likely be a waste given that the hardware wouldn't be able to reach its true potential and there's still the few open bugs concerning the Hawaii GPU support on the non-Catalyst driver (e.g. broken re-clocking).

The HD 7950 or R9 270X should be a great fit for open-source gamers. With this hardware there's also the UVD-based VDPAU video decoding, VCE video encoding via OpenMAX, and the other latest open-source AMD Linux functionality. If you're looking for a more mature graphics card to get potentially second-hand or in a discount bin, the Radeon HD 6870 continues to run great with the open-source Linux driver where you'll be much better off with the HD 6800 series than the HD 6900 series.

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To see more open-source driver OpenGL benchmarks for these twenty Radeon graphics cards, see yesterday's Steam on Linux comparison results.