AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux

While OpenArena isn't a popular game for owners of high-end PC hardware, the results right away were yielding interesting numbers... the XFX Radeon R9 290 with the latest Linux Catalyst driver was only marginally faster than the Radeon HD 7950! The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 was also a hell of a lot faster than the R9 290. At 2560 x 1600, the R9 290 was 23% faster than the Radeon HD 7950 and the GTX 680 Kepler was 16% faster than this Hawaii GPU.

Unigine's tech demos are among the most demanding OpenGL Linux benchmarks right now. When running Unigine Heaven at 1920 x 1080, the R9 290 was now at least faster than the GeForce GTX 680 but not by a wide margin.

Unigine Tropics at 2560 x 1600 titled the results in favor of the GeForce GTX 680 over the Radeon R9 290. The R9 290 was only a few frames faster than the HD 7950. It's now becoming clear why AMD doesn't care about Linux reviews on the Hawaii GPUs... Something is wrong.